


The Die is Cast

by sundogsailor



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Emperor Hux, Foreplay, Hux has a Bad Time with Feelings, Implied Rough Sex, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Kylo Ren Has No Chill, M/M, Major Character Injury, Manipulative Hux, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Power Dynamics, Psychological Trauma, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-12-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 13:27:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 35,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7642411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sundogsailor/pseuds/sundogsailor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Ren told Hux it was time to strike against Snoke, their bodies had lain entwined with one another, tangled, skin on hot skin. Treachery slipped softly from the man's plush lips, treasonous words that <i>Hux</i> had first planted there, now fed back to him in a perfect cycle. So they'd gone, and they'd won. But now a third of the intended triumvirate lies shattered, struck down from the inside out, strapped to a bed in the medcenter. The crown bears heavy on Hux's skull, without him. </p><p>And then, Ren wakes up.</p><p>Or, Hux succeeds in wresting empire from Snoke, but at a price. It may ultimately prove too high.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Roll

**Author's Note:**

> Please see the individual chapter notes for additional content warnings on a couple of them. They're sporadic but I thought I would include them for a couple more specific things that otherwise fall the existing tags.

Cold. Hux was cold. His throat hurt, his muscles burned with unremembered exertion. He vaguely recalled collapsing, screaming, the _pain,_ and then-

Suddenly it all snapped back.

 _Ren_.

He rolled to his side, looking down from precipice of the wide, rough-hewn steps that separated them.

The man stood hip-deep and trembling in the slick, fetid pool below, slapping ripples quickly ebbing from where Snoke had just passed from screeching, rage-filled thing to object, his wracked body subsumed at last into the depths of his oppressively dank lair. Hissing steam rose up to partially obscure Ren’s form, the man’s lightsaber relentlessly boiling away the water into which it had slowly dipped, but it couldn’t hide the glint of blood trickling from his nose, so dark it looked black.

Their gazes met and Ren’s was wide and vacant behind water-matted hair, the black strands sticking in porcelain-crack disarray over his pallid skin. It was empty and horrible, and made Hux’s heart jump to his throat.

“Ren,” Hux called, finally able to drag himself unsteadily back to his feet. The chamber deadened his voice, taking out all of the hard ring he’d grown accustomed to in his domain of harsh-edged spaces and leaving it flat and small. It occurred to him that if there were ever a time to feel victorious, or vindicated, or simply slackly relieved, it should be now; and yet he couldn’t feel anything close. It seemed as though the agony Snoke inflicted hadn’t stopped, not really, even though they should now be the usurpers triumphant.

“Ren!” He shouted, louder this time, anger mixing with growing alarm.

The man staggered, turning as he took a lurching step away from the pool’s center and the dais beyond. On the second one he went down, splashing mostly under only to surge wildly back with a sputtering cough. His saber spat furiously, held in what would surely be a white-knuckled grip were Ren’s gloves off. He caught Hux’s eyes again with that wild, empty look and opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

Kriff, what Hux wouldn’t have given to see him like this, once. Part of him still felt a sick sort of thrill at the image of Ren brought so low, but cold, pervasive fear quickly superseded it as the man splashed closer. He’d grown into more than just an object of hate and utility for Hux in the last months, as much as it mortified him to admit it, even to himself. Ren was an essential co-conspirator in his own right, though as hair-trigger as ever, and a wild lay. The last bit had spiraled entirely out of Hux’s hands, which perhaps made it the most dangerous.

Hux slid the rest of the way down the slick steps, not trusting himself to make it while upright without cracking his head open. He met Ren halfway, barely managing to hook his arms beneath his shoulders before the man finally collapsed front-first. His body sagged half out of the pool, crushing Hux’s legs as his chest heaved and his left hand came up to claw wordlessly at the General’s back.

Something was very, very wrong. It certainly had to do with the damn Force, with whatever had gone on between Ren and Snoke after Hux had found himself crushed against the stone by the old man’s horrible powers as easily as a butterfly beneath a pin.

“Turn it off,” Hux ordered, barely keeping the overwhelmed shake out of his voice as the quillion of Ren’s forgotten saber drifted uncomfortably close to his side. “Turn it off, damn you, he’s dead.”

He fumbled down to grab Ren’s wrist and force the blade awkwardly away but he wouldn’t relent until, grimacing, Hux physically pried it from his hand. He finally found the ignition and killed it, tossing it to clatter on the steps above and leaving them lit only by the weak glow filtering from a single crag in the ceiling.

He had to get him out of the water.

A pitiful sort of keening noise slipped from Ren when Hux attempted to heave him up, boots slipping ineffectively against the slimy stone. He was unforgivingly heavy, his bulk only exacerbated by his waterlogged robes, and Hux was not a strong man. He settled for only two hard-fought steps, enough to leave just the tails of the Knight’s surcoat trailing in the mire of the pool.

No, not a knight any longer, Hux corrected himself. Knighthood was honor bound, and this one had just killed his liege.

Part of him had never believed they’d really be able to do it, even up to the moment he and Ren had walked into the dank chamber together and passed the point of no return, despite Hux’s unrelenting drive when faced with seemingly impossible challenges. He only hoped that Phasma had succeeded in dispatching the remaining Knights of Ren, the final loose strings in the three’s still tenuous coup. Cutting the head off this snake was, unfortunately, not enough to kill it.

Hux grunted, rolling Ren’s half-rigid form over and pushing the sopping hair from his face. The blood trickling from his nose hadn’t stopped, mixing with water to run in inky-dead streaks over his face and neck. He hissed when Ren’s massive hand clamped around his forearm, stopping him mid-motion as he went to wipe it away, pinching the muscles there painfully. He doubted it was in response to him, however, more likely just a blind grab for whatever or whomever was closest. Far worse were his eyes, wide open and flickering about frenetically with what had to be abnormally blown pupils, even for the dimness of the chamber. Upon closer inspection Hux realized that one was larger than the other, and he swore.

“Damn it, come on!” It came out as a growl, frustration and exhaustion and even some level of genuine worry all pouring forth in a jumbled mess. A damp shudder ran through his body and he tried to pull away, but Ren, tense and smelling of mold and ozone beneath him, would not relent his hold. Hux slapped him hard on the cheek with his free hand, wanting it to sting like the impotent fury overtaking him again did, but even that failed to rouse a reaction.

Fuck.

Hux sagged back with a frustrated bark, hating Ren’s bulk and horrible vacancy. He couldn’t tell if the root of his rage was at Ren or rather _for_ Ren, but he found he didn’t care, not really. He would not have the man comatose for the rest of his days from whatever he’d been unable to resist Snoke doing to his head, the notion twisting his stomach for reasons both sympathetic and selfish.

Correction: he could not lose Ren because, in the cold calculation of things, their success depended on his survival.  

Hux’s grand plan had been structured around their partnership in this, in taking what they deserved and keeping it, and they’d both known they couldn’t do it without the other or without Phasma. Hux would hold the most power as the originator of their scheme, of course, but if they managed to beat the astronomically low odds of taking Snoke’s citadel, ruling the Order securely would still require all three of them alive and functional. Now, his entire world felt suspended at the edge of an unexpectedly pyrrhic victory. If anything, he would have expected _himself_ to be the one ripped to shreds, whether literal or figurative, by Snoke’s wrath.

Hux tried to pull away again, but without his previous conviction. It was no use. He would have the bruise on his arm for weeks, he contemplated, already seeing the thing in his mind’s eye. Stark and inelegant, like everything Ren did. Or had done. Perhaps it would be the last bruise he’d ever give him, or anybody. Something important had been torn violently away from inside Ren, stringing his body tight and twisting his expression in to a blank-eyed rictus, everything horrible that Hux had ever imagined to be under his mask before he’d caught that first glance of dark hair and flecked skin on Starkiller.

Water soaked through the seat of his jodhpurs. The chill of the chamber finally set hard into his bones, a creeping ice that he wondered would ever go away, assuming he made it out of here.

The comm at his hip crackled to life and Hux nearly leapt out of his skin, Phasma’s clean enunciation cutting through the static generated by the citadel’s thick walls. He fumbled for it, failing to catch anything of what she’d actually said, and forced the lump in his throat back down.

“Repeat, Captain. You’re breaking up.” He coughed once, voice hoarse from the screaming.

“The damper worked, Sir, we’ve neutralized the two remaining Knights.” She came in stronger, a sign of closing distance. “I take it you’re alive?”

The barest trickle of relief washed over him upon on hearing her words: this was real, and they’d done it. They’d actually done it.

“Yes, I’m alive,” he breathed. Amazingly. “But Snoke did something to Kylo Ren. I need a medical team here as soon as possible.”

“Roger that. We’re rendezvousing at the inner sanctuary now.”

“Make sure they-“

“Hux?”

He whirled, his name barely a hoarse, scream-raw whisper on Ren’s lips but more than enough to get his full attention. A scant degree of focus had come back into his eyes but flitted out again just as swiftly, leaving him no less taut and unresponsive than before. If anything, the grip on Hux’s arm actually tightened. It all hit again, the sting of hot emotions that drove him but would always be his undoing as an officer.

“Captain?” he added.

“Sir?”

“Make it _fast_.”

 

 

\---

 

 

The screaming started again the next day.

Hux first heard him a full thirty meters down the hall outside Medical, Ren’s agonized voice reverberating through even the ten centimeters of the durasteel blast door that kept him safe within the high security ward. It was a scream guaranteed to put even the most hardened officer’s teeth on edge, that of a mortally wounded man not yet resolved to death and fighting with every useless, terrified shred of himself.

“Physically, he’s fine,” the head physician informed him, only able to speak without going hoarse from shouting after ushering Hux into an adjacent office. “Even if he’d reaggravated his injuries from Starkiller, the scale of the pain wouldn’t be anywhere near intense enough to elicit this reaction.”

Hux could see him through the window behind her, corded muscles straining against where the staff had been forced to strap him down to the bed to keep him from clawing his own skin off in agony; the angry red gashes along his chest and face attested to the fact that he’d tried. Though no longer rigidly unresponsive, it was abundantly clear that his current state was by no means an improvement in terms of regaining consciousness. Wherever Ren was, it was not behind those wild, bloodshot eyes. He looked like an absolute wreck, sweat drenching his forehead and the front of his medical-white shirt, face contorted in violent anguish beneath a knotted mess of lank, oily hair. One strand stuck against his bared teeth, thrown there by some violent turn of his head.

The doctor paled when Hux’s gaze came back to her, his face stonier than usual. “Whatever it is, it’s in his head,” she explained. “We’ll keep trying, sir, but I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to do anything more effective than sedate him and hope it works out on its own.”

“Do it,” Hux ordered, not bothering to deliberate on other options. He just wanted the screaming to stop.

If Ren’s loss was the price to pay for victory then so be it, he resolved, mercilessly crushing the sharp leaves of bereavement that struggled to germinate in the acid soil of his heart. The Order came first, and he would make this work without him. He pressed in hard on the bitingly tender flesh of his forearm, sneering and chastising himself for his damnable proclivity for attachment. He’d gotten what he’d wanted out of the intimacy, after all, and that was where it should have stopped.

He swept out of the bay with the cold snap of bootheels on steel, Ren’s howls fading behind him into small, choking gasps and then an empty, ever expanding silence.

 

 

\---

 

 

“And do you, Armitage Finley Hux, accept the station of Emperor and the responsibilities and obligations there entailed? To lead the First Order in all aspects, both military and of state, for the betterment and expansion of her dominions and peoples?

“I do.”

“The so be it. Rise, Emperor Hux.”

He did, ascending from bent knee to lock eyes with Phasma. She reached out to carefully pin a small rubied First Order insignia to his dress coat’s lapel, a lonely pip of color against the gray and white of their uniforms and the flat, rocky landscape. The crown came next, a single thin circlet of silver that Hux had initially objected to. He held the opinion that the location of the ceremony alone would provide sufficient gravity for the day’s events, the blackened remnants Snoke’s long-razed citadel crumbling behind him like the bones of some great beast.

He’d desired no ostentation or pomp, but his freshly appointed public policy advisors had won out. He had to send a clear message to those watching, both within the Order and without, and the circlet served that purpose impeccably well. The staging itself was more appropriately restrained, however, befitting a military change of command; although the adrenaline in Hux’s veins felt similar, this was nothing so dramatic as firing Starkiller. The platform he and Phasma occupied along with their most trusted senior officers rose low over the plain, fronted by various planetary delegations and several battalions worth of military personnel. High sunlight struck coolly off the various formal insignia and armors of the gathered assembly, each member rapt and in their place. To be present here today was a privilege, and they were all acutely aware of it.

Phasma presented the circlet to him almost reverently, and he lifted it without hesitation from her hands. The pin had been an exchange, but no one would crown Hux but he himself. The band weighed negligibly upon his brow as it settled, but it suddenly felt as though the heft of starships, perhaps twins named _Power_ and _Expectation_ , bore down upon him with it as well. He straightened imperceptibly, his posture already rail-straight. His back had been built to carry them.

“My troops,” he proclaimed, voice ringing out with savage conviction and eyes stoked by the fires of now unfettered ambition as he addressed the assembly. “Today we start on a new path to the reclamation of the Imperial ideals so cruelly wrenched from the fingers of our mothers and fathers. Let us grant no respite to those who stand in our way or divert us for self-serving purposes. We will crush the New Republic and its bastard child of a Resistance, who both for so long have allowed chaos and disorder to fester and breed throughout the Galaxy, and subjugate those systems that do not join us freely. Let it be known that I, as Emperor, will give no quarter, and neither shall you. To victory!”

The resounding callback of “to victory!” shook the dais, and Hux smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again, folks. I'm back with more of this ship.
> 
> I can't guarantee an update frequency because I currently work 6-7 day weeks, but I hope to post once every one or two weeks. I've got about 15k written currently so there's a decent buffer.


	2. Threshold Score

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two additional warnings for this chapter: Kylo and Hux are both very bad at communicating consent and not being absolute assholes, and there's some violence. I've also updated the tags.

Hux scrubbed at his eyes, a rare gesture of weakness he allowed himself only because of the privacy of the shuttle’s small cabin. He’d been awake for twenty nine hours now, too busy to sleep before the coronation speech and taken up with official paperwork and state meetings afterwards to get it all sorted out legally. It wasn’t anywhere near his record, by far, but he could feel himself fading.

Only six more hours, and then they’d be in range of the hyperspace lane. Snoke’s choices had always been esoteric and often impractical, such as making his citadel entirely inaccessible to anyone without extreme patience and a very good sub-lightspeed pilot. He begrudgingly supposed that the remoteness was the point, but it still rankled him even though the old mystic was dead.

The pneumatic discharge of a door hissed from the companionway, indicating that Phasma was moving about. He would have to get used to calling her Grand Admiral now. He tapped two more caf pills out from the bottle on the built-in desk before fitting himself into the berth, holding them contemplatively for a moment while staring up at his reflection in the glossy black of the overhead. He could go talk with her, debrief about how her political maneuvering had gone after they’d parted ways at the stage, or… he could just close his eyes and let himself drift.

The first thing that tugged him back to awareness was the hum of the ship, no longer close and high-frequency but a distant, throbbing oscillation. It was cooler, too, just enough to make the hair on his bare shoulders prickle up. He opened his eyes and saw-

This had already happened.

This was a memory.

Ren surged at him, eyes dark, and he barely had a moment to brace himself before they collided again. His back hit the bulkhead hard, the man’s frame caging him as he caught his lips in a driving kiss. Hux growled and countered aggressively, wrenching the other sleeve of his jacket off and tossing it somewhere towards the side table, too heated to do more than hope it landed nicely. He barely managed to make Ren yield an inch before the Knight slammed him back again, pinning him by the upper arms and fixing him with a hungry, hateful look.

“You’re a bloody savage, you know that?” Hux bit, but he knew his eyes were dark too, his sneer an invitation.

“Shut up,” Ren growled back, striking close to sink his teeth into the side of Hux’s neck. He cried out at the sting, hands flying up to scrabble at Ren’s unforgiving wrists, his breath growing heavy as the man nipped further up until he finally sucked a deep, toothy bruise just behind his ear.

Hux panted hard, biting his lip wetly and searching Ren’s face as the Knight drew back, his grip still iron at his shoulders. He couldn’t reach up to correct the stray copper locks that brushed loose across his forehead, and heat colored his cheeks.

“That’s better,” Ren hummed, a predatory grin breaking onto his face. One hand released Hux to come up to his cheek instead, cradling there for a moment. He tried to lean into it, only for Ren to snake higher and wrench it into his hair with a snap. Hux hissed but kept eye contact, bringing his own hand up and wriggling a tight grasp around Ren’s pinky.

“Watch yourself, Ren,” he growled breathily, prying the finger back in warning. Ren’s expression twitched, but he didn’t relent. Their trysts were always rough, both of them caring more about their own pleasure than the other’s comfort, but Hux couldn’t have Ren thinking he could just take whatever he liked. He’d been especially pushy so far tonight, eyes bright with resentment and lust in equal parts, but Hux was determined that Ren would only get what he allowed him to have.

The moment hung there for several more pounding heartbeats, Ren’s expression murky with conflicting passions. Hux slowly raised an eyebrow, just daring him to push it, and he saw it, he _saw_ , the moment Ren decided not to listen. The fingers in his hair began to tighten and in that split second Hux wrenched back, prying the man away with a sickening pop.

Ren shouted, reeling away and fixing the General with a murderous glare as he cradled his hand. Hux pushed himself off the bulkhead with a sharp smirk, desire still heavy in his eyes. “It’s only dislocated,” he stated conversationally, walking a wide arc around him. “Surely you’re used to worse.”

“Fuck you,” Ren spat, popping the joint back into place.

Their positions had changed now, Ren between Hux and his door, Hux’s back to his bed and the viewport. Beyond was nothing but starfield, smeared lengthwise by the hyperdrive acceleration. It cast everything in starkly reflected shadow, softened only slightly by the dimmed overheads.

“You know you like it,” Hux barbed, heartbeat skittering. “It’s better when you have to work for it, isn’t it. Why else would you keep showing up at my door?” Ren’s expression re-collected itself, sending a shiver gripping around Hux’s chest. The Knight could utterly destroy him if felt so inclined, but playing with fire was part of the appeal. He was toeing his own line now, one that could end very poorly despite Snoke forbidding them from permanently damaging one other.

“You can’t hurt me,” Hux ventured, despite the probable imprudence of doing so. “I think you keep coming back because no one else can say no to you.”

The Knight took a wordless step forward at that, no longer half-hunched from the abrupt pain Hux had inflicted. He swallowed apprehensively, eyeing Ren as the man exercised his gloved hand, curling each digit in turn. Kriff, it must still hurt, but he gave no sign. Another step. Hux’s eyes flickered up to gauge the Knight’s expression, but all he got was determined storminess. A third step and Hux fell back one in compensation, hands balling into fists. Weak. He bit his lip in chastisement, hunger, restraint, nearly hard enough to draw blood, and then Ren was in his space, black fabric brushing against him, breath ghosting against his cheek, a heavy hand pulling his waist close.

“Perhaps,” Ren finally rumbled. “But the way you wrestle with your self-control is always _so_ fascinating.”

Hux pressed back against Ren’s chest with his palms, shuddering out an exhale he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He hated Ren’s intractability but stars, did he get a thrill from this. What had begun as a tactical decision had spiraled in unintended directions, hitting on proclivities that Hux hadn’t even realized he’d had in the bedroom. The pressure of Ren’s tugging forced him to adjust his stance, shifting his growing erection against the inside of his trousers and sending a burst of heat curling up his belly.

“It would be easier for both of us if you just-” Ren began, only to gasp as Hux ground the heel of his hand against his bulging crotch. He clearly hadn’t expected the escalation, not when he thought he’d gained the upper hand again. But it was all Hux had left.

“Just what? Let you do as you please?” He tightened his grip, hoping it pushed over from pleasure to pain.

“Yes,” Ren hissed, sharp and insistent. “Let go, Hux.”

He just sneered, refusing to acquiesce. Pushing it. Ren’s look hardened, a twitch of his mouth all that gave away his desire to grimace.

“I said _let go_.”

And suddenly Hux’s breathing was _wrong_ , his startled inhale rendered useless by Ren’s fingers circling around his neck like bands of iron.

He gaped reflexively and dug his other hand tighter into the man’s surcoat, struggling against his body’s natural panic response but staggering as a wave of dizziness hit. He’d found where the line was tonight. It wasn’t the first time Ren had gone this far in their intimate power struggles, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying.

Ren reached leisurely down and pried each of Hux’s fingers from his groin, a smug smile replacing the pained twitching as he forced himself free. Instinct finally overrode Hux’s body and he lashed out at him, black dots overtaking his vision. He barely comprehended the sudden change in angle when his calves hit the mattress and Ren toppled him down onto it.

And then he could breathe again.

He gasped desperately, rolling to his side as the digging pressure on his arteries disappeared. The headboard of his bed fuzzed into view, rocking a bit as his chest heaved, lungs rushing to re-oxygenate his brain.

“Better,” Ren’s baritone came, the undercurrent of lust strong again. He grunted and shifted back on the cool sheets, realizing that his neck remained collared by the barest phantom constriction, just enough to provide a hint of lingering lightheadedness and a constant reminder of the Knight’s power.

“Are you happy now?” Hux rasped out, but the words lacked their usual bite. The terror had ebbed, giving way to an adrenaline-fueled heat that suffused every bone in his body. Sometimes he wondered why he was wired this way, but never came up with a satisfactory answer.

“I am,” Ren replied. “Aren’t you?”

Hux just bit his lip. He didn’t have a response to that, not one he could stomach to say out loud, at least. He hauled himself up on an elbow to pin down where Ren had spoken from, partway towards a sitting position but without the inertia to actually achieve it. He had just tugged off his surcoat and started on his tunic, garments pooling on the sole as he went to reveal the scarred planes of his torso. The expression under all that loose dark hair was nothing but pure hunger now.

“You’re taking too long,” Hux finally chided in lieu of answering Ren’s question, flopping back down and wriggling out of his singlet. Ren fixed him with a searing glare for that, and he threw the top in his general direction. He knew the Knight hated it when he dodged openly acknowledging defeat, even as he lay overpowered and sprawled out with a persistent hard-on below him.

The bed dipped as Ren crawled on to it with one knee between Hux’s thighs, everything but his tight trousers gone. Hux tried to readjust his position again but Ren was faster, pinning his wrists down at either side of his head. The way his muscles stretched and rippled with the movement was captivating.

“If keeping up the snippy act makes you feel better, then fine,” Ren rumbled, hair hanging loosely down around his face as they met eyes. “But would it kill you to admit that you like it when someone else makes decisions for you?”

“To what end? I know you skim my thoughts already,” Hux shot back, wanting Ren to just get on with it. They’d had their customary pissing match, Ren had won as he frequently did, and now it was time to move on to the rest of it. “Besides, _ah—”_ he stuttered, a knee-on-groin grind briefly taking his breath away, “—you hardly have a stellar track record where making decisions is concerned.”

Ren ignored the jab for once and leaned down to purr lowly into Hux’s ear. “It would be different. You make such a show of keeping me from what I want. What _you_ want, when I win. It all just seems like such a waste of our time.”

Ren dipped down further to bite a kiss to his bared neck, and suddenly Hux couldn’t take it anymore.

“Then bloody get on with it, you useless idiot,” he ordered with a buck of his hips.

And Ren did, until they had kicked all the sheets off the bed, dented the headboard and scattered half the contents of Hux’s nightstand out across the compartment. It was heated and utterly satisfying, and everything Hux wasn’t supposed to want.

 

 

He sat back against the head of the bed with a pillow bunched under his back, closer to the edge than normal thanks to the impact crater from Ren’s heel taking up his usual leaning spot. That was going to be a hell of a thing to submit a maintenance request for. His fingers itched for a post-fuck cigarette but he had none, as excessive smoke fouled up the _Finalizer’s_ air filters and would probably set off the fire suppression system. He settled for scratching at his stubble instead.

Ren lay naked beside him, turned away and curled in on himself with one leg tangled in a sheet. Stark white bands and puckers of scar tissue littered his torso and thighs, some obviously from battle wounds but others of less clear origin. They looked washed out in the hard light of the hyperdrive-smeared stars, disappearing into darkness as they curved over his back and giving it the appearance of some crater-pocked moon.

The posture made Ren look younger in Hux’s eyes, and he didn’t like it. He told himself he much preferred the smirking, violent Knight to whatever softness his current position hinted at, which he couldn’t allow himself to think was real. He knew where he stood with the public Ren, the one he’d hated on sight the moment they’d first met in the _Finalizer’s_ docking bay, but not so much the one lying next to him now. The uncertainty of what to do with the uncharacteristic tug of _something_ he felt for the resting man made him deeply uncomfortable.

Maybe now it was time to make the move he’d been planning for months. Before he couldn’t trust himself anymore.

Hux reached out and traced a finger over one of Ren’s longer welts, running in a cluster of three, feeling the man tense as solidly as durasteel beneath his touch when the gentleness of the motion registered. The wounds looked semi-recent, perhaps only weeks old. Had Snoke inflicted them during one of Ren’s now-frequent visits to his citadel, or had Ren inflicted them upon himself?

“These are new,” he forced himself to start. “What sort of master beats his apprentice?”

“What sort of man breaks his lover’s finger?” Ren evaded. Snoke, then, Hux decided.

“Apparently the kind you want to fuck.” And _dislocated_ , thank you very much, he was about to add when he realized what Ren had just said. His _lover_. That was not what he needed to kriffing hear right now, no no _no_. This was not an issue of lovers, this was just _tactical_. Physical, at most. Actually caring about this wild man was not part of the plan. He thrust the thought out of mind with vicious conviction, amping himself up to keep going.

“Ren,” Hux murmured, low and intimate. “You’re wasted as you are.”

“What?” he frowned, rolling his upper body over to face the General. Hux tipped his head down, meeting the look Ren shot up from beneath furrowed eyebrows.

“We could do so much more together. Are you really content with Snoke sending you about like his personal errand boy?”

“Like you’d be so different,” Ren growled, flipping entirely around. “If it were up to you, I’d never even set foot outside my quarters unless you ordered it.” He paused, a dark smirk curling his lips. “Which you can’t.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “But Snoke will never let you live up to Vader’s legacy.”

“My _master_ is wise beyond your knowledge.” Ren’s face and tone abruptly deadpanned, and Hux knew he’d touched him off. He pushed on.

“People fear you, Ren, but not because they respect you. Vader had the 501st and helped raise the Empire to ascendancy, and yet the Supreme Leader doesn’t even trust you enough command the _Finalizer_ on your own. He keeps you in the shadows, keeps you from the achieving the presence your grandfather maintained in the Empire.”

“And what do you presume to know about his plans?” Ren snarled, pushing himself up to level with Hux. Anger splintered hotly in his eyes, turning his dishevelment from fucked-out to feral.

“Do you honestly think he cares about you?” Hux avoided, reaching out to trace another scar on Ren’s chest only to have his hand slapped down to the mattress and held there by long fingers. “You’re just a tool. He’ll discard you the moment you cease to be useful. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t order me to just leave you there in the snow on Starkiller.”

“Careful, Hux. You’re edging dangerously close to treason.”

“Against what, the Order? Me, of all people,” he chuckled.

“You know kriffing well what I mean.”

They stared each other down for a few more tense moments, and then Ren pinched a face and threw himself back down to the bed. He rolled away to stare sullenly out the viewport, anger and confusion radiating off him. Hux shook out his fingers, cramped by the man’s grip.

Hux slipped down too then, pressing the length of his own naked body against Ren’s cool skin. He stroked a hand over the muscled roll of his shoulder and down his arm, ignoring how the sinews there twitched like those of a flighty animal. The Knight smelled intoxicatingly of sweat and earth when he leaned in to whisper against his ear, stray black hairs tickling his nose and cheek as he lingered above him.

“Think about it, Ren. You and me. We could be something more. I wouldn’t keep you kenneled in your quarters, or promise you training and give you nothing but empty words and lashes. Your strength is yours, and yours alone.”

“Your hunger for power will be your undoing,” Ren whispered, words that would’ve been gruff had they been spoken any louder. “The Supreme Leader cannot be disobeyed.”

Hux lingered for a moment, and then pulled away. They exchanged no more words, each instead drifting alone in the stillness of the compartment. He eventually found himself coasting on the microvibrations of the _Finalizer’s_ systems, flowing like trickling rivulets and thrumming rivers, each one distinct and identifiable. Their steady presence drowned his uncertainty, lulling him away into a sleep he couldn’t pinpoint his time of entry to.

Somewhere in that halfway moment, Hux made peace. If Ren told Snoke of his insinuations, he would die. That was unquestionable. Even calculated risks were still risks, and many greater men in history had failed not because of unsound decisions, but because of unpredictable milieu of variables they decided in. He just hoped that if he did fail, he did so with his head held high. It was all he could ask.

A rustle of bedsheets drew him to wakefulness at some point later, his weight shifting as someone moved on the mattress beside him. Hux looked up, bleary eyed and not entirely conscious, to catch sight of Ren hunched over against the cold durasteel of the viewport frame. He faced away, a dark form ringed in flat white.

“Ren?” he whispered, tugging the sheet tighter around his shoulders. That hadn’t been there before, he realized. Had he pulled it to himself during his sleep?

The Knight’s head snapped around, a moment of surprise instantly overtaking the emotions previously occupying his expression. Hux caught them, though, and they remained etched in his mind’s eye: deep thought, loneliness, conflict, fear.

Ren reached out in one fluid motion to catch Hux’s forehead with his fingertips, and suddenly he was gone, plunged back into the deep, inky well of sleep.

 

 

When Hux woke again, he was greeted by the high whine of shuttle engines and the hard mattress of a regulation berth. The caf pills had stuck to the sweat of his palm, leaving blue smudges over the white crescent scars that resided there. He threw them against the door with a shout, only for them to bounce away with an unsatisfying _tak tak_ , doing nothing to relieve the stew of emotions that jammed in his throat and threatened to overtake him.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes unforgivingly before rolling over and checking the chrono on his datapad. He’d slept for too long. His work wouldn’t wait. Phasma, he needed to speak with Phasma, and he had to initiate the bureaucratic restructuring process he’d laid out weeks ago.

Hux heaved himself out of the bunk, tossed back a fresh pair of pills, straightened his collar, took a breath, and stepped out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promoted Phasma to Grand Admiral rather than General because the storm troopers seem more like marines to me than an army, especially because they spend most of their time aboard ships rather than on the ground. Plus it sounds cooler.


	3. Doubles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enter Phasma.

 

Once, in the fiery aftermath of a protracted but victorious battle against the remobilized New Republic fleet, Hux lost himself in the moment. He could feel the power of an empire at his fingertips, a field of rent and burning hulls filling the panoramic screens of Battle Command.

He yearned to return to the flight bridge and see the wreckage for himself, to watch as crippled ships succumbed to the gravitational drag of the rust-brown planet below and see the long-flaring tanks of those forever condemned to the void snuff themselves out, but it would be hours yet until combat lockdown expired. For all that prudence was second nature to him, sometimes the magnetic, bone-deep pull of raw destruction made him resent the restrictions of his own protocols.

Hux turned on instinct at that thought, ready to intercept and shut down whatever prodding comment was sure to fall upon him: perhaps a purring _we aren’t so different after all, General_ , or just the echo of deep laughter rattling around his skull. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late.

If any of his command crew noticed the tic or the brief flicker of self-reproaching pain across their Emperor’s face, they didn’t show it.

 

 

\---

 

 

When they’d finally made the decision to move forward and oust Snoke, it had been at Ren’s suggestion.

 

 

\---

 

 

Three months. Three months since he’d crowned himself and seized the uncontested helm of the Order.

Hux leaned forward off the settee to prop his elbows on his knees, scrubbing a hand over his face and the rough evening stubble gracing his jaw. He sat in the receiving room to his personal suite, the chamber alone nearly as large as the entirety of his old quarters aboard the _Finalizer_. A bolt-proof pane of transparisteel opened the upper half of the wall behind him to a large courtyard garden, allowing the last tendrils of the fading day to spill over his shoulders and cast the space and its clean-cut furniture in dusky hues. Two comfortable chairs and their attendant side tables opposed the settee, creating a corridor between the external doors and the deeper recesses of Hux’s solitary living space. Silence dominated, save for his own breathing, and he found it fitting for the still and reflective moment he found himself in. Oddly, they seemed to be occurring more often these days.

He still kept working quarters aboard the _Adjudicator_ , his fleet’s newly commissioned flagship, but now split his time between the familiar flow of the bridge deck and the spacious chambers of the Imperial capitol complex on Balchorra. It was too utilitarian to truly be called a palace, retaining a streak of starship sensibility and far more restrained than anything of the Old Empire. Even so, whenever Hux was forced to attend to business planetside his body and mind yearned for the gentle hum of engines beneath his feet and the neighboring closeness of the black.

In brief, unbidden moments late at night he sometimes found his mind traveling the old companionways of the _Finalizer_ , now deployed to the Shapani Bypass as part of a high-risk excursion force pressing in upon the Republican Colonies. So much of his adult life had occurred aboard her: his promotion from Lieutenant to General, Starkiller’s initial drafting in a packed conference compartment over copious amounts of caf, the first time tensions had finally snapped and he’d been smashed against the bulkhead by-

He was not going to think about Ren. There was no point anymore.

The red-orange light caught his hand as he reached to the settee’s side table to avail himself of a second finger of port, throwing off a pale glow against the rest of the dimming space. The clink of glass on glass and the subsequent slosh of the pour were bright and satisfying and almost meditative. He sat for a while longer, allowing himself to drift off in the roll of it over his tongue and the subsequent buzz that left his limbs feeling worn, but his internal clock soon pulled him back to attentiveness. A brief glance at the chrono on the wall told him it was 2027. Nearly time for Phasma to arrive.

Sure enough, three minutes later the door chimed softly and her access request code shone to life an inch off the holopanel. He waved it away with a sweep of his hand, unlocking the door without shifting from his seat.

“Grand Admiral,” he greeted, gesturing for her to have a seat. She returned the formality with a precise incline of her head and took one of the chairs. Long gone was her Stormtrooper armor, but she still shone as silver as she always had. Chromium plates interlocked along her high collared white suit, a minimalistic fusion of combat armor and a high officer’s uniform. It would’ve been a shame to waste the metal, given its Imperial legacy. She’d let her hair grow out from its standard military crop now that she spent most of her time bare-faced, just long enough at this point to take on a gentle wave as it brushed across her forehead. Hux still wasn’t used to her new appearance; in all the years they’d known each other, she’d been reluctant to release herself from the habitual comfort of her helmet.

She leaned forward, expression calculating. “Well? I thought this was supposed to be a celebratory drink.”

He took another glass and filled it, stretching across the space between them to pass it to her. “Celebrate away,” he toasted, too far to actually clink with her. “To us. And the Order.”

“You don’t seem particularly enthusiastic, Hux.” Their customary dropping of honorifics and pretense in private was refreshing, but sometimes he forgot just how well Phasma cut through his otherwise impenetrable front of authority. She was the only one who could get away with it these days. “We secured four entire systems in the last standard week, and that’s usually plenty to get your blood boiling for more. Only three months and we’ve done more than Snoke ever did in years. _Three months_.”

“Am I really that transparent?” he sighed, leaning back and intently contemplating the artfully framed schematic of the Death Star’s firing mechanism hanging just past her shoulder.

“You are.”

“Sometimes I feel as though all this”—he gestured vaguely to themselves, the room, the universe—“is just some dream I’ll wake up from and be back in my cot at the Academy,” he admitted. “We’ve come so far but it’s still so uncertain. The Resistance proved a point with Starkiller, and we proved one back with Snoke, and now the Republican Navy is fully involved. Our infrastructure pales in comparison with what the Old Empire had, and our budget is balanced, but for how long?”

“None of those are new problems,” Phasma countered, eyes hard. “You’ve dealt with them all before, and in worse conditions. It’s a matter of scale, and we have the capacity to match them.”

“You remember what it was like, living in exile in the Unknown Regions,” he continued, ignoring her interjection. “We come from _nothing_ , Phasma, no matter my father or your mothers. We’ve dreamed of reclaiming empire for so long, but now that we’ve actually got a chance at it-“

“Stop,” she ordered, her presence hardening into solid steel, the material of command that bent armies to her will. “You think I came this far to have you balk because of a fit of imposter syndrome? That’s never stopped you before, I don’t think it ever could. I know you, Hux, and you’re not telling me everything.”

They stared each other down, Phasma’s body language burning with indignation and Hux crushing his fingers against the ridges of his now empty glass. The light was finally dying now, slipping in as only the barest bar near the ceiling. The hard shine of her eyes bore into him, and he suddenly couldn’t take it anymore.

“It should be three of us,” he bit out. “This was supposed to be a triumvirate.”

“Oh, for the love of-“

“Listen!” He slammed the glass down on the side table, his turn to rail, voice raised just above his usual commanding calm. “Politics and the military are _crucial_ to an empire, and that’s you and me,” he gestured between them. “But the Old Empire had Vader. Hells, Palpatine was a bloody Sith too! As esoteric as I find this Force business, I can’t deny that the bastards who use it are powerful. And currently, of all the Force users I’m aware of, one blew up the Death Star, another helped destroy Starkiller, and the rest are either dead or as good as. We have no chips on our side in this. We needed Ren.”

Phasma regarded him stonily, unmoved by his anger, and all the heat he felt curdled up into something cold and uncomfortable in his gut. He was right in this, he knew it, but he wasn’t going to like whatever she was about to say.

“So you, the man who engineered and fired a weapon that destroyed billions, who took the Order by a bloodsoaked _coup_ , are cowed by two Jedi?”

He gave her a hard look, just daring her to push it.

“Stop pitying yourself and do something about it. They aren’t invincible. Miniaturize the damper technology. Increase the bounties on their heads. This is not intractable, _sir_.”

Oh, that stung, the biting _sir_ giving him the kick in the ribs he hadn’t realized he’d needed. Phasma was right, damn it, she was always right, and always had been on issues like this ever since they’d met when he was just a commander.

He gave in, grimacing and passing a hand through his hair. “Perhaps you have a point. It’s no use focusing on what you can’t change in the past, and we’ve been doing a fine job of this so far.”

The barest smile quirked on her lips, “There’s the man I know. You practically _are_ the Order, Hux. If you set your mind to it, I believe we can accomplish it.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I know you do. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have duties to return to. Thank you for the drink.”

“By all means, Grand Admiral. Your dedication to the troops is exceptional.”

Phasma nodded and stood, leaving her glass. She made her way to the door, something else unsaid on her lips.

“Hux-” she paused, one gloved hand hovering over the panel. “If all this is about your more… _intimate_ relationship with Ren, I suggest that you move on. Drop it or find someone else to fill your bed, because stars know you could use it. Ren’s done.”

Hux blanched in shock, feeling as though all the air had been sucker punched from his gut. His mouth opened for some reflexive retort but the words failed him, leaving him only to gape. He hadn’t thought that Phasma _knew._ She hit the panel and swept out, leaving Hux sitting half-hunched in the pooling darkness of the room, the deepening navy of the sky behind him giving inexorable way to pinpricks of stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter was so short; the next one is a whopper. I no longer have a ridiculous work schedule, so I'll be able to update this a lot more frequently now!


	4. Bet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ATTENTION: See the end notes for several additional chapter content warnings.

After his conversation with Phasma, Hux never again found himself before the door to Ren’s medical suite, waylaid for unclear reasons on his way across the complex from meeting to audience and back again. It was a place he’d only been inside once, when the medics had moved Ren there, and he’d watched them hook him back up to all the equipment: vital signs, anti-atrophy sleeves, saline and nutrient drips, a sedative line, and a mess of other things. Ren had been calm at the time, caught in the gentle jaws of real sleep, hair clean and face peaceful.

Hux certainly did not hold his hands tight to his sides as he paused there for a fifth time, wrench himself forcefully from the memory, or will himself to start walking again and leave the sleek black door behind.

It wouldn’t do to be distracted, after all.

 

 

\---

 

 

Battle report after battle report made their ways through Hux’s office over the next month, an ever-growing stream that joined the river of crewing manifests and budget logs and diplomatic paperwork. The lost, they won, they drew stalemates with the Republican Navy. The remnants of the Senate, consisting mostly of those representatives in absentia at the time of Starkiller’s firing, had reconvened and covertly assimilated the Resistance as a tactical strike arm of their own forces. Hux still didn’t know the location of their new assembly venue, but planned to have it within a standard month. Organa apparently had not been pleased by the decrease in autonomy her militia suffered, a piece of information painfully extracted from a terrified Republican flight technician.

Two particular reports caught Hux’s attention as he sat on his office’s balcony on Balchorra, and he swept the rest of the morning’s correspondence off to an aide. The planet had grown on him since he’d chosen it for its location and rich resource deposits, new small details presenting themselves to him the more time he spent here. The yellowish foliage of the courtyard below seemed especially neat today, trimmed to perfection but rustling nonetheless in a cool breeze from the clear western mountains. It was quite pleasant to feel it across his skin, cooling where the slightly bluish sun dipped in under the roof. Sunny days had long been a rarity in his planetside experience, and still struck him with an odd sense of novelty.

The first report regarded the _Finalizer,_ which had been so far successful on her excursion toward Thyferra. She and her accompanying fighters had dispatched several small Republican squads on the way, but were struggling to lock down trade through the Rimma route given its proximity to the Core. If the Order could constrict the flow of bacta and other essential medical supplies from the planet, they could deal a crucial blow to the Republic’s casualty survival rate and the morale of their forces. Wars weren’t won by brute strength alone, Hux knew, and had conceived the risky deployment personally.

The second missive was shorter, but tantalizing. He read it quickly.

Apparently one of their primary calabrum processing stations had been destroyed, blown to bits by its own electrolysis tanks overloading. It would put scheduled weapons repairs dreadfully behind schedule, the metal being used in components that fined-tuned energy output for the high-capacity cannons carried by most star destroyers and frigates. It had been a smart target, an important link in the supply chain but nothing especially flashy.

The truly interesting part came at the end. Eyewitness reports confirmed the primary assailants to be the scavenger girl, whose name he’d since learned to be Rey, no surname, and an unidentified male companion. This was the latest of several reports over the last few weeks involving her, coming after months of nothing. Something was brewing, he could feel it. And it didn’t seem good.

“Lieutenant Ibris,” Hux called, comming one of the officers he’d assigned to run his personal errands.

“Emperor, sir,” came the snappy response.

“Contact Financial Affairs and have them double the bounty on our scavenger. And schedule me a meeting with Jarlsson from Tactical Engineering, as soon as possible. I want someone from both her Naval Armament and R&D units, as well.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“Dismissed.”

An appointment notification flickered up on his personal datapad not five minutes later. It was time to deal with the Force users nipping at his heels once and for all.

 

 

\---

 

 

When Hux heard the news, he was freshly planetside from a stint on the _Adjudicator_ and caught in the middle of a Command Council meeting. The deployment had resulted in a scant victory, securing treaties with several systems in the Colonies but losing two more to Republican interference. His white uniform lay as sharp and stiff as ever, and his hair rested without a strand out of place, but he felt fatigue creeping in at the edges of his mind. Fully parsing the report from his intelligence chief was slowly becoming difficult, though she had his entire attention. Her pale fingers were steepled as she leaned forward in her chair, glasses of water and datapads scattered by her elbows among the group of eight in the black-paneled conference room.

Ibris took a step forward from his respectful position behind Hux’s left shoulder, leaning down to speak softly by his ear. Hux’s face drained of color upon hearing the message.

“Your grace, Medical just sent word. Kylo Ren is conscious.”

Phasma looked over from across the table, and they locked eyes. Ibris kept talking, but Hux didn’t hear. Her expression dropped into one of knowing resignation before she turned back to the data holo spinning lazily at the center of the room.

“Ladies, gentlemen, excuse me. I’m required elsewhere,” he interrupted, standing abruptly and gathering his personal items. They all gaped at him as he swept out, stunned. The Emperor never left Command meetings early.

“What’s his condition?” Hux demanded of Ibris as soon as they were headed towards the exterior steps of the statehouse portion of the complex. The young man practically jogged to keep up with him as they passed from shade into the afternoon sun, their steps creating a syncopated beat against the prefabricated tiling as they exited.

“Very awake, sir, apparently he’s asked for you. At last word, he was weak and disoriented. And angry.”

“Of course he bloody is,” Hux swore. “Tell them I’m on my way.” He swung a leg over his personal speeder, kicked the brake off, and left Ibris in a cloud of dust.

It took him no more than two and a half minutes to reach the Imperial Residence, and exactly four to speed walk to Ren’s medical suite. He forced himself not to run, but stars did he want to. By the time he arrived at that sleek black door, his pulse was thrumming. Was it hope? Uncertainty? Fear? Most likely all three. He was still trying to process the abrupt revelation that Ren was not, in fact, actually gone. Months of grieving—and he’d finally accept that grieving was what he’d been doing—suddenly seemed like robbery.

He thumbed in his security code, shoring himself up for whatever waited inside, and stepped in.

He wasn’t ready.

 _Vader’s bones,_ he thought, stopping dead just past the jamb. The door hissed shut with an air of finality.

The first thing he saw was the blood, gouts of it, all across the luminously white walls and floor and still pooling. Most of it seemed to come from the three bodies in the center of the room, littered with lacerations and surrounded by lethal-looking scraps of rent-apart droids and medical equipment. Another medical officer lay at Hux’s feet, her limbs outstretched, her head wrenched entirely around. The entire space had been thrown into disarray, and his mind kicked into high gear to catalogue the situation. All the injuries sustained had apparently already been fatal, so he could deal with the loss of personnel later.

All this in less than ten minutes. And they’d said he was _weak?_

“Sir,” came a trembling voice, snapping Hux’s attention over to where the wall on his right curved away. A meditech dragged herself half-out from behind an intact bank of stationary monitors, her sterile whites staining dark despite the hand she had clamped to her thigh. They locked eyes for a moment, hers half-glassy and wide, before she flicked a fearful look to the opposite end of the suite. Hux followed, jaw clenching at what he saw.

Ren sat half-crouched on the floor against a medical bed, his head hung bonelessly down, the rest of his body sagging as though under its own weight. A fabrisynth restraint encircled his right wrist and forced his arm upward toward the mattress at a strange angle, trapping him close to it. He’d clearly busted the other three open, their remains beyond repair. Blood speckled his feet and calves below his medical issue underwear, shining wetly in the circular room’s bright lights. He looked like death warmed over but he was still _Ren_ , alive, all wan skin and labored breathing and overgrown hair tangling across his bare shoulders.

Ren lifted his head, assessing his room’s newest occupant.

“Hux.”

“Ren.” Something animal flashed in those eyes.

The man’s free hand came up from where it had been resting limply on the floor, as though reaching out for something. The door beeped, and Hux knew with unquestionable certainty that he wouldn’t be able to disengage the lock now even if he tried.

“You’re safe,” he attempted, unsure of Ren’s mental state. “We won.” He took two ginger steps forward, carefully skirting the cooling woman at his feet and signaling the terrified meditech to stay put. A smooth movement of his hand activated the silent alert beacon on the comlink at his hip. He tried to keep his boots out of the blood, an ingrained instinct while in dress uniform, but it was a worthless effort.

Ren responded with only a disconcerting chuckle, and Hux stopped cold.

“You’re different,” he drawled, head lolling a bit, the words coming out slurred. Still sedated, then, to some extent. Upon closer inspection, Hux could see a detached IV catheter peeking out from under the collar of Ren’s tee. They hadn’t been able to stick him in the arms because of the anti-atrophy sleeves they’d fitted him with.

“Excuse me?” Hux replied.

“I said you’re different. You look older.”

“I-“ he stumbled, caught uncharacteristically off guard. This situation was not what he’d expected to enter to, not in the slightest. He tried to focus on how Ren’s eyes tracked his movements, how his shirt bunched and folded, anything to distract from the fact that he’d killed four people just moments prior. Ren had caused considerable property damage to the Order many times before, but had understood that fatally harming Hux’s personnel was unacceptable, no matter how angry he was. Something had clearly changed. Now Hux had no guarantee that the hair-trigger energy buzzing under Ren’s skin wouldn’t turn on him as well, and that was deeply unsettling.

“Cat got your tongue?” Ren prodded liltingly, locking bleary eyes with Hux. “Oh, I forgot. You lost her after Starkiller.”

He gritted his teeth. What had he been expecting, to sweep a freshly-woken Ren into his arms, one ever grateful to his lover for having pulled him to safety from that cesspool of a Citadel? Of course it wasn’t that easy, it never was with this damned man. When had he gotten so kriffing _soft?_

“I’m not surprised you think that. You’ve been unconscious for months, Ren.”

“Don’t call me that!” Ren suddenly exploded. The suddenness of the change was jarring, an unrestrained frenetic tension coming into his posture. The lights flickered and dimmed, then snapped back on in time for Hux to see tremor waves vibrating through the pungent pools of blood that separated them. The meditech screamed. Hux raised his hands in deference, extremely unenthusiastic about provoking Ren right now.

“Kylo, then.” He inflected it halfway to a question, his heart hammering in his throat.

“No,” he responded, much more quietly, head down again.

“No, don’t call you Kylo?”

“I’m nothing,” he mumbled, or at least Hux thought he did, so muted that he failed to really catch it.

He swallowed, unsure of how to proceed. This was the part he truly hated about Ren, the part he’d never honestly known how to deal with. He didn’t make any kriffing _sense_ when he was emotional, his thought processes too internalized and scattered to be able to predict. He scraped for something to say, anything, but drew nothing but a gaping blank.

“I actually thought I’d be free without him,” Ren’s voice came, taking away Hux’s chance. “It’s like a hole. He was there for so long, I’d forgotten what it was like to be alone. Even when I was hiding from him. Hiding us.” His head tipped back against the side of the mattress, something hardening in his look.

“He _burned_ me, Hux. He burned me from the inside out and he just _kept going_. You were right about that, at least, that he’d throw me away.” Then, more softly: “You were both right.”

“You beat him,” Hux attempted, not even trying to puzzle that one out. “You’re safe now.”

“ _Safe?_ ” Ren spat the word out. “Drugged up and strapped to a bed? They wouldn’t let me- They wouldn’t tell me anything. Only to wait for you. They called you the Emperor, Hux, is that true? They wouldn’t-” and Ren just gestured to the scene in the suite.

“Might it have occurred to you that I had you put here for your own protection?” Hux bit, unable to maintain the evenness of tone that others probably would have gravitated toward.

“You can’t protect me. Not from what he did,” Ren stated with grim finality and then laughed again, that same empty, eerie, sound that gave Hux the impression that he’d breached some sort of sacred privacy to hear it. But then the chuckles abruptly died off and his brow furrowed, his attention intently searching Hux’s face.

“I listened to you, but now I know I shouldn’t have. It was pointless all along. I shouldn’t have fought him. It’s all still tearing me apart, Hux, can’t you see?”

“What’s done is done,” he responded, not liking the manic gleam he saw building in those eyes. “You need to lie back down. Let yourself rest.”

Hux finally managed the nerve to cautiously close the distance between them, moving slowly and deliberately around the mess of the suite, until he could lower himself to a crouch about half a meter away from the other man. Ren averted his gaze by dipping his whole head away, lank hair obscuring his face once more.

“I’m fine,” he growled, but a tic shivered its way down his body as he spoke.

“No you aren’t, not yet. Come on,” Hux ordered, tentatively reaching out to Ren’s free hand. When he received no sign of protest he closed his own around it and attempted to pull him up, but to no avail. The whole limb just hung loosely in his grip, a discomfiting inversion of the last time he’d laid hands on the man.

Hux sighed and crouched back down, trying to peer through to Ren’s face and catch his attention. “I can’t lift you unless you help me.”

After a long moment of silence, Ren turned back of his own accord. A new kind of despair knit his brows together, one whose hallmark was empty acceptance, not the vaguely frenzied helplessness that had wracked his features before. It was chilling.

“Why are you pretending you care?” he asked.

“I’m not.”

“I’m not somebody that people care for,” Ren went on, apparently deaf to anything Hux had to say. But that stung, oh did it sting, both the words and the way Ren delivered them. “I never have been. Not now, not… before. Hells. You probably never cared, either. You just used me like my- like Snoke did, another tool for the having.”

Hux’s heart nearly stopped. He froze, paling as Ren finished, the man’s arm still gently held on his knee.

A silent beat passed.

“Kriff,” Ren hissed, eyes growing large with shock, confusion, and a sick dawning clarity. “ _Did_ you?”

“No-”

“Was all of it a lie, Hux?”

“No, Ren- Ah!” he shouted, cut off by Ren twisting his hand from Hux’s and viciously grabbing a messy fistful of hair instead.

_“Tell me!”_

Suddenly his thoughts felt like they were slogging through oil, the thick, black kind from a failing, archaic engine that left whatever it touched to ignite at the slightest heat. And then Ren was there, inside his head, striking a match. This wasn’t the vaguely uncomfortable surface skimming he’d experienced before; it was a violation.

Hux screamed, helpless to stop him from rifling through his mind, his world tunneling down to the indescribably foreign pain and the peculiar way the light glinted off that particular bit of viscera, there, the one he could see across Ren’s knee as he fought against the vice grip on his head. He could feel which memories Ren was taking, and they were only the ones he _wanted_ , in this instant, the ones Hux couldn’t help but think of. There were many: the moment he’d realized, late in his off-watch and still reeling from Starkiller’s loss, that Ren’s loyalty was the key to taking what he was owed from Snoke; his hazy post-coital assessment of Ren’s receptivity to the treasonous suggestions he’d rehearsed like he would a speech; how he had guided him, as the weeks and months went on, and stoked his belief that the only way he’d get what he wanted was to buck his master. They kept coming, each stripped of how Hux’s attachment had grown like a blighting weed until it overtook the entire garden. It was stunning how the man could reach and take so much and still be so wrong.

Hux finally managed to break free but only because Ren let him, apparently having seen enough. The man practically threw him away, his features contorting with ugly rage. Hux panted, sweat breaking out along his starched white collar, re-confronted by the image of Ren as the irredeemable beast he’d pegged him for at the very beginning, chaotic and violent and unworthy of human sympathy.

But damn it, Hux had to try. One last time.

“Ren, listen to me-“

“I told you not to call me that!” he screamed, wrenching his trapped hand from its cuff with a sickening pop that Hux wasn’t sure had come from the wrist or the rended fabrisynth. Ren lurched to the side with the momentum, catching himself with both palms, bloodying one with a wet slap into a spatter of red. Hux skittered back on reflex, his boots slipping. Ren swayed up to his feet, bracing himself against the bed, snarling.

“This is your fault. You convinced me that I could kill him, that it would be _better_ , and now you sit on your pretty little throne, playing Palpatine while I _suffer!_ ”

Hux cried out as he slammed against the opposite wall, his shoulder catching most of the impact before it rolled into to his back and still succeeded in knocking the wind out of him. The jerk backwards had been clearly telegraphed, Ren shouting wordlessly with effort as his hand came up in a violent sweep, but there was nothing Hux could’ve done to avoid it. He crumpled, clutching at the injury, the contents of an upended supply cart clattering down around him.

He happened to catch a glimpse of the long-forgotten meditech as he wheezed in, who was trembling silent and wide-eyed in her hiding place with her hand clamped over her mouth. Hux struggled up, suddenly re-oriented to the fact that he’d had the foresight to activate his alert beacon. How long had it been since then? He couldn’t focus, couldn’t calculate. His escort would have to be here soon. Whether or not they’d be able to get in was another question entirely.

“I feel all of it, Hux, every moment of living hell he put in my head,” Ren growled, stumbling towards him. He was still maybe four meters away, but closing fast. “And now I know that you were never any better than he was. Were you going to toss me away now that you’ve gotten what you always wanted?”

“You made your own decisions,” Hux grated back, surging with anger. “I never forced you into anything.”

How _dare_ Ren liken him to Snoke? He may have initially cultivated their relationship for strategic gain but it had been real, damn it, real and tempestuous and _good_. Hell, it had even been something one might call _tender_ , at the end, before they’d gotten on the shuttle to the Citadel together for the final time. Ren had told him he thought it was time to strike against Snoke with his body fitted up around Hux’s back and their legs intertwined, tracing the fine hairs along his neck and sideburns with one finger as he’d murmured into his ear.

The Ren he found himself faced with now was very, very different.

He lunged for his throat in a blur, still thankfully uncoordinated enough from the lingering sedative that Hux managed to knock the grab aside. Ren caught his jacket sleeve instead, and Hux tried unsuccessfully to wrench away. He could smell the hot huff of Ren’s breath over his cheek as the man redirected, this time striking with his other hand for Hux’s hair. They were too nerve-wrackingly close now to bat him away so instead he kicked, buckling Ren’s knees out with a _crack_ just as fingers knotted into his hair.

They toppled, landing with a wet thump amidst the lacerated bodies from Ren’s initial rage. Hux cried out as the same shoulder as before took the brunt of the impact. Ren seized the opportunity to scramble on top of him, wrenching his head back and pinning his arms with his full weight. Even now, the man was damnably strong.

Hux couldn’t bear to look him in the eye as he was held there, a hollow emptiness pitting itself in his stomach and mixing with the anger and fear-soaked adrenaline. He felt sick, Ren’s bulk on top of him _wrong_ , the hand slowly ripping out his hair clenched with unmitigated cruelty. He swallowed hard, scrunching his eyes shut as he attempted to turn away, but with little success. Ren’s grip was crushing.

“You made me think you cared,” Ren hissed accusatorially. “That you _loved_ me.”

“I do,” Hux managed. The words were like glass coming out, already broken and only smashed further by the world they were spoken into.

“ _Liar!”_ Ren screamed, ragged and slurred and raw to the point of tears.

And that was when he realized, with crippling awareness, that Ren was actually going to kill him.

Time seemed to slow. Ren transferred one hand and then the other to his throat, a tear, then two and three and four, falling to spatter on his face from beneath the man’s curtain of hair. He struggled with his freed hands, pushing and grasping against Ren’s solid mass even as the edges of his vision prickled black, the darkness surging with each great sob that wracked through Ren’s body and transferred to the grip on his windpipe. Oh, how the Commandant would’ve been disappointed. His son would die not by assassination, not by incineration or depressurization in the black as his starship crumpled around him, but choked to death by someone he’d allowed himself to trust, lying helpless amongst the corpses of his staff-

Who’d been cut to pieces by shrapnel.

 _A chance,_ his hindbrain screamed. _A chance!_

He groped out frantically, one hand blindly searching as the other pushed against Ren’s chest, his face, anything to buy himself more time. And there, _there_ , just as Ren’s hands constricted with a deadly finality and he felt himself losing consciousness for good, he found it and _wrenched_ , swinging inwards as hard as humanly possible.

Ren screamed, once and briefly. The pressure crushing Hux’s windpipe lessened, just enough for him to knock the remaining hand from it with a sharp push. Ren’s weight shifted sideways with a jerk, his right arm braced to the side of Hux’s head to hold himself up as the other clutched at his side. A nasty shard of transparisteel protruded a solid hand’s length from between Ren’s fingers, his own blood blooming out around it to join the stains and smears from that of others. The look on his face was pure shock, mouth silently agape as he looked down to the wound and then back up to Hux.

Hux coughed desperately, deep ones from his whole chest, thrashing against the weight above him in the instinct to break away and re-oxygenate. The sweet, sweet air carried strength back to his muscles, just enough to succeed in toppling Ren off entirely and roll free. His heart felt like it was going to hammer its way out of his chest and so he just lay there, face up, feeling the fluids he rested in slowly saturate the back of his uniform. He could hear Ren keening softly beside him, curled in upon himself, but even the idea of trying to comfort him made Hux nauseous. All that mattered was that Ren stayed there, as far away from him as possible.

Motion registered at the corner of his eye and he saw that it was the meditech, limping to the door and frantically keying in its code as someone thumped from the other side. When the pneumatics discharged with a hiss and a pattering of boots flooded in, Hux let out one final hitching gasp of relief. He attempted to push himself up on an elbow, to face them with dignity like the Emperor he was, only to grunt in re-remembered pain and collapse back to the floor.

A pair of escort troopers appeared promptly at his side, shifting him upright even as he batted them away. He knew he looked like a wild mess, blood matting everything from his hair down and his pristine uniform ruined.

“I want him gone,” he gritted, bright eyes fixated on Ren’s curled and trembling form, obscured now by swarming personnel. “I want him _gone_.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS: Non-consensual mind reading, intense violence.
> 
> Poor Millicent :(


	5. Collection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ATTENTION: See the end notes for two additional chapter content warnings.

They immediately rushed Hux to the medical wing proper, the staff setting him up in a private room with two of his personal guard stationed outside. Even when he insisted that he was just battered they didn’t stop fussing, but then again, he hadn’t noticed the deep cuts canyoning across his fingers and the heel of his palm until he’d moved to accept assistance up from the floor.

According to his physician, he was in shock.

“-lacerations, acute bruising to the neck, and a fractured left humerus. It’s all very treatable, but you need to allow time for the bacta to work.”

Hux tugged at the edge of the blanket they’d draped around him, something to keep him warm after they’d cut his blood-soaked shirt off to get at his shoulder without moving it. It was gray and wooly, the only soft thing in the utilitarian white-paneled room besides the cot he sat on. A medical droid was finishing wrapping his hand while a human tech tugged gently at his other arm, sliding a sling under it. It smelled new, fresh out of the package, the synthetic odor almost unreal as it wafted upwards. Even the cool slide of it against his skin seemed strange, disconnected-

“Your grace?”

“What?” He looked up, struggling to recall if D’Oro had been speaking. His personal physician was older, brown skinned, most of her hair overtaken by gray. She wore a pinched look.

“You need to let the bacta work, sir. Your cuts and bruises can be treated with patches, but the humerus will require several days in a microtank.”

“No. That’s too long.”

D’Oro sighed. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

After a moment of hesitation, Hux obliged. “Granted, Doctor.”

“You’ve experienced a traumatic event and your judgment is currently impaired. Returning to work immediately, as is your habit, will be counterproductive and damaging to your person in the long term. You need to rest and recover. I can’t keep you here, but I can promise you a difficult time if you don’t acknowledge the severity of the event and take the necessary steps to get back on your feet.”

Hux stared at D’Oro, mildly stunned. No one besides Phasma had the nerve to talk to him like that.

“Twenty-four hours,” he snipped, bridling at her presumptiveness, even though the idea of just holing up in his quarters and never leaving had seldom sounded more attractive. “That’s all I can take off.”

“As you wish, sir.” D’Oro left with a perfectly-cut bow, leaving the techs to finish patching him up and help him move to his suite. It was a strange trip, one that almost felt like a dream, Hux walking under his own power with his guards and a trail of medical personnel and equipment behind him. The hallways were deserted.

He felt caught in an eerie state between anxious energy and dazed drifting, one that persisted past when they all left him alone, face-up in his bed with his left arm immobilized in the portable tank. The painkillers started to work quickly, however, which was a small relief. He kept envisioning Ren’s face wrathful and horrid as he’d looked down and strangled him, the violence there a realization of potential that Hux had never truly witnessed firsthand.

Did he really love Ren? If he didn’t now, had those words still been true when he’d spoken them? Would it have been their speaking that killed them, or the moment after when every mole and stray hair and tear streak suddenly seemed to belong to a man Hux didn’t know, the intent to kill in his eyes?

He didn’t sleep for hours that night, despite the exhaustion sinking into his bones. The _Adjudicator’s_ deployment, his return from which seemed so long ago now, had already sapped his reserves to the point where he’d been running on empty since the morning. None of the events of the past hour or so had helped that. He simply watched, bleary eyed, as the ruddy light slanting in through the high windows of his bedchamber crept upwards and finally died out three-quarters of the way to the ceiling.

He startled slightly whenever the door from his receiving room opened in darkness to admit a meditech on their hourly round. _It could be Ren_ , his body screamed at him, and he had to push down a wave of nausea every time. He knew it couldn’t be, the man probably so shot up with drugs by now that he’d never see straight again. Or he could be dead. That was a concept he hadn’t considered, but someone probably would have told him if it were true. Hux pushed the entire train of thought away as best he could.

When sleep finally did manage to slip its fingers around his mind, it was to the gentle burble of cycling bacta and his own shallow breathing.

 

 

\---

 

 

“What have you told the Command Council?”

“That you’d been pulled away to deal with an urgent, highly classified matter. Which, technically, is the truth,” Phasma informed him. Ren was indeed classified, information about his status and whereabouts kept strictly under wraps even from Hux’s advisors. The galaxy probably presumed him dead, and Hux had preferred it that way.

He hummed in acknowledgement, wincing slightly as the meditech manipulated his arm to fit him for a brace. He sat propped up shirtless against his headboard, Phasma in her habitual parade rest at the bedside. D’Oro had guaranteed that the brace would be invisible under his uniform, stabilizing the bone for the week or so it would take for nightly bacta treatments to heal it fully. It was a strangely calm picture, morning sun bouncing off the white walls to backlight the clean cut furnishings and the people within. His bedchamber matched the minimalist aesthetic of his receiving room, as did the rest of the suite. What funds they had were far better spent elsewhere.

“I’ll be back momentarily, your grace,” the tech said softly, finishing her measurements. At a stony glance from Phasma, however, she blanched. “Just call when you need me,” she amended, and fled the room.

Hux sighed and met Phasma’s gaze. “Where is he?”

“A bacta tank. The shard perforated his intestines, but he’s stable.” She paused, her frustration palpable in the air, lip twitching in an effort of control. It finally bubbled over, driving her to pace with clipped steps about the room.

“Hux, what were you _thinking?_ What did you even expect?”

“Not what I walked into.”

“Clearly,” she bit. “He nearly killed you.”

“I know.” He didn’t want to talk about Ren, the nausea bubbling up in his stomach again. But he couldn’t afford to look weak in front of Phasma, not now, despite the trust he had in her and her fealty. Besides, he had his pride to worry about. “I believe I gave as good as I got.”

Her lips set in a grim line. “You shouldn’t have _gotten_ at all. We both know Ren was never stable. Why you thought he would be reasonable after coming out of months of sedation escapes me.”

“He overrode the locking mechanism.”

“After you stepped inside.”

“Grand Admiral,” he warned, voice as stony as he could manage.

Phasma sighed, capitulating. “Fine. We can get a cosmetician to cover up your neck. Ren is contained well enough for now.”

“But,” Hux questioned. He knew that tone.

“Organa’s launched an offensive. One of our scout cruisers intercepted their comms an hour ago. We know a large force is inbound for the Quelli Sector, but specifics about the system and time of arrival are unclear.”

She produced a slim datapad from her interior jacket pocket, passing it to Hux. He accepted it with furrowed brows, scrolling through the report. Quelii was close, and yet not so close to Balchorra to be of major concern. But it was still troubling. The First Order maintained no major installations there, so what were they after? Could they be seeking out their base of command? He knew rumors circulated the wider galaxy that they were based out of somewhere in Quelii’s vicinity.

“Meet me at Tactical Command in half an hour,” he ordered, thrusting the pad back at Phasma. “I want to know exactly how large their fleet is and its motive for being there by the time I arrive.”

“Already working on it,” she acknowledged, throwing a sharp salute. She turned and strode away, the sun glinting off her chromium as she swept through the pneumatic door.

Hux swung his legs out with a huff onto the cool polished floor, eager to sink his teeth into something strategic. He could already feel his focus narrowing, star maps and combat evolutions marching through his head in ordered patterns. This he was good at, this he thrived on. It wasn’t at all like the business with Ren, too cluttered and soft and conflicted for him to handle right now.

He padded to the ‘fresher, gently cradling his left arm as not to put undue strain on it and pinging for the tech as he went. They’d told him in Medical that he was lucky he was right handed, taking just a gash to his firing hand rather than an immobilization of the whole limb. Hux didn’t feel lucky. Before he stepped into the sonic stall he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the sink, and was startled by it just enough to pause.

The deep bruises blooming over his neck reached all the way up to his jawbone, rough and patchy. He reached tentatively up to brush his bandaged fingers over them, wincing at the pressure, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. He couldn’t span their breadth, his hands being only reasonably sized. The rest of him didn’t look much better, with hints of bruising creeping over the pale skin of his slim upper arm and shoulder. He knew he stank of bacta and overnight sweat, and exhaustion still weighed heavy in his steps. It all made him feel dirty, damaged, undisciplined. His lip curled up in a sneer at his reflection.

The discharge of a door outside signaled the return of the meditech, and Hux shook himself out of it. Shower, dress. Eat something. Have someone cover up his neck and go back to work. He was the Emperor, not just any man of power. He would carry on, broken body or not.

 

 

\---

 

 

The first time he mustered up the resolve to visit Ren was six days later. His stomach still turned queasy at the prospect, but he was determined not to let baser instincts rule him. With the situation in the Quelii Sector locked in stalemate, he found his attentions circling back to the man.

Organa had requested a meeting of diplomats, in person, which Hux had refused on the condition that they demonstrate proof of their nonviolent intent first. That would take nothing short of disarmament on their part. Organa said she wanted to end the war with words and treaties, before it ended itself with more loss of life. Hux didn’t believe her. She might play the moral high ground, but he knew not to accept anything from her that appeared to be out of pure goodwill or empathetic pragmatism, not with her history. She had more Vader in her than she probably liked to acknowledge.

In the meantime the fleet just hung there, closely monitored by the Order’s own ships but making no moves. Perhaps they shared Hux’s reluctance to engage without a high chance of victory, saving their resources for the future, but it was puzzling in an infuriating, knife’s-edge sort of way. The fleet was too small to justify an outright attack on without betraying Balchorra’s exact location, and simultaneously too large to just let be. He’d resolved to let the ball linger on Organa’s court for at least a little longer.

For now, he could take time to deal with other problems.

They’d pulled Ren out of the bacta tank yesterday, his gut wound sufficiently mended to be released from Medical. Hux had conferred with Jarlsson to modify a cell to hold him without resorting to drugs, which had already failed once, instead constructing a damping field that shrouded the whole space. Technically the man was guilty of treason, and Hux had no softness left to afford him any luxuries after what he’d done. That included the haze of continued sedation.

Each step down the confinement wing felt like growing fractions of a bad decision, but he knew that he couldn’t stew in his own unresolved anxieties any longer. The fallout from their confrontation had absolutely wrecked his quality of sleep, and his attention kept veering back to uncomfortable territory whenever he wasn’t directly occupied with work. Hux didn’t often agonize over the morality of his decisions, secure in his commitment to the Order and the necessity of whatever means he employed, but the rictus of hurt and betrayal in Ren’s snarl that day had eaten at him like acid burning through tender flesh. Hux hadn’t betrayed him. He _hadn’t_ , not in any way that really mattered. He’d felt something real for him. Been ready to share an empire with him. The weed in the garden had won. Didn’t that count for anything?

Either way, a second problem remained. Ren had made an attempt on his life, and with conviction. Hux wasn’t sure he could forgive him for that, or if he even wanted to. The leather of his gloves creaked in the deserted corridor as he dug his fingers into his palms, bitterness radiating out from his core at the consideration.

Hux’s strides clicked to a halt at the security door, and he briskly punched in the requisite codes. It hissed open, permitting him through into the observer’s portion of the small dark-paneled cell. He exhaled slowly, softly, deeply. Ren couldn’t hurt him here even if he wanted to, not with the low hum of the Force inhibitors hidden away in the walls. He would attempt to deal with this mess as he would any other hairy problem: directly, efficiently, and as professionally as he could. He doubted it would be easy.

Ren lay facing away on his side in the small cot against the back wall, again barefoot in medical whites. His hair spilled over the edge, messy and tangled, but clean. The one indication of his continued state of life was the slow rise and fall of his chest. Besides the bed, the only furnishings present were a toilet and sonic shower emitter, both without any privacy shielding, and a rumpled pile of duraweave blankets in the corner.

Hux managed a step closer, drawing up to the thick transparisteel pane that separated them. Ren didn’t respond, and Hux thought for a moment that perhaps he was ignoring him until he he realized: Ren _couldn’t_ be. Without the Force and without the microphone on, he had nothing to indicate that anyone was even in the room with him. So for a long moment, he just stared. At his back, the disappearing swell of his upper arm, the way one foot stuck out beneath the other beyond the end of the thin mattress. The posture reminded him strongly of that night more than a year ago in his quarters on the _Finalizer,_ post-fuck and before Hux’s first attempts to sway him to cast aside his loyalties.

Acid bile and that forever foreign urge to comfort pushed simultaneously in his chest, his body unsure how to respond to the juxtaposition, much less simply seeing the man again. He briefly considered just turning around and leaving, but stopped himself. He’d committed to following through.

The mic button on the wall clicked on under his white-gloved finger, startling a twitch down the line of Ren’s form. The man shifted and curled more tightly in upon himself, as though he could shrink away into an invisible point of nothingness if he just tried hard enough.

“Ren,” Hux called, inflectionless.

Ren’s head snapped around, his body unfurling just slightly as though to sit up. Shock, the angry, exhausted kind, gripped what Hux caught of his features before the expression crumpled and he rolled back to the wall.

“Go away.”

A long pause.

“No.”

“What do you _want?”_ he growled, one big hand slipping up and wrenching at the dark locks at his temple. Hux didn’t respond and the seconds ticked on, drawing out into a heavy silence. Ren broke first, turning just enough to check whether he was still there.

“Haven’t you used enough of me up yet?” he snarled softly, dragging himself to sit reluctantly up and huffing. “I’m done. Your grand plan worked, and I paid your prices for you. Just let me be.”

Again: “No.”

Ren stood abruptly, his face hard, and closed the couple strides across the cell with startling speed despite the stiffness that lingered through his side. For a moment he remained stock still, and then cracked into brutal flow of motion.

His fist slammed into the observation pane, just shy of where it would’ve connected with Hux’s jawbone had they not been separated. Hux flinched, his eyes flickering shut and his heart slamming up into his throat, but remained at an unshakeable parade rest. He opened them to see Ren’s face pressed close, nearly up against the transparisteel, his gaze raking in Hux’s features with strained intensity. Frustration slowly overtook his expression it until he was full-on snarling. Hux could read the terrible confirmation of impotence in his eyes. The fear.

 _“Fuck!”_ he shouted, wheeling away from the divider. “Just tell me what you kriffing want, Hux!”

“To talk.”

“Why should I talk to you?”

“Because I need to decide what to do with you. You tried to kill me. That’s high treason.”

Ren paled, crossing his arms tightly over his chest. The skin where his fingers gripped bloomed white, all the blood pressed out. He turned as though to respond but stopped, frozen, before closing his mouth back up and looking away.

“Give me a reason not to execute you.”

Silence.

Fury bubbled under Hux’s skin. “ _Really_ , Ren? Not a single bloody thing to say for yourself?” The man flinched, his attention skittering resolutely anywhere but on Hux. His hand went threateningly to the pistol at his hip. “I could open this cell right now and shoot you, and you wouldn’t be able to do a kriffing thing about it,” he snarled.

“Then do it,” murmured Ren. His eyes slid up to Hux’s and held them fast, an intensity there that he hadn’t seen in a long, long time.

All at once, Hux realized that he couldn’t. He couldn’t possibly.

“What the hell is _wrong_ with you?” he snapped. So much for professionalism.

Ren laughed, bitter and cold. “Really? Are you so emotionally constipated that you have to ask? You know kriffing well what’s wrong with me.” He advanced again toward the transparisteel, practically shaking. “Everything I did was for _you_ , Hux. For you. I gave up my Master, my loyalties—I was ready to give up my _life_ —and it was all for a lie! I’d still be screaming now from Snoke ripping into me, if it weren’t for these _fucking_ dampers.” At that he punched the barrier again, one, two, three times until the skin of his knuckles split red.

“I wanted so badly to make you Emperor, to be your Knight, and instead I get _this_. Kept in a cell like a dog. Would you have kept pretending that you wanted me for more than the Force and a fuck if I hadn’t looked in your head? I thought you- I thought you were _different._ All I’ve spent my life doing has been being used. As a Resistance posterchild, by Snoke, and now by _you_. I don’t want anything to do with you, or the Order, or _anyone_ anymore. So go ahead and kill me. It doesn’t matter.

“Ren-”

“Don’t. That title died with Snoke.”

Hux exhaled, long and slow, steadying himself under Ren’s hot gaze. He felt flayed open, each word a lash. Ren—Kylo? The name was too intimate for this, one he’d only panted breathily and half-delirious into the other man’s neck—moved away again, blood dripping off the ends of his fingers to patter on the floor.

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Oh, what a relief,” he mocked, slouching down on the cot with one leg bent to his chest and the other splayed insubordinately out over the edge. He brought his knuckles to his mouth, suckling the blood off them indignantly. It was bright, a stark contrast to the sallow exhaustion of Kylo’s face.

“You’re mistaken about me, Kylo. I did care.”

“How can you possibly expect me to believe you? I saw everything, Hux.” He tapped a finger to his skull in punctuation, a sneer that edged on disgust stretching ungracefully across his wide mouth. “No more lies.”

Hux couldn’t handle it anymore, not the in indignant knowing in Kylo’s posture, not the way his chest and shoulders clenched from forcing himself to stay at attention, not any of it. Even now, when he’d resolved to keep himself the cooler-headed one, had accepted the idea that Kylo’s attempt on his life would be enough to keep him unsympathetic and cold, the infuriating man succeeded yet again in taking him apart. His arms fell to his sides, fingers twitching, his left stiff in the brace, and he took a pace along the barrier. Kylo was wrong, wrong wrong wrong-

“Three and a half months! For three and a half months I thought you were as good as dead, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it except stand at your door and imagine what it would be like to look at your comatose body and I _couldn’t_ , you understand? You have no idea how fast I came running when they told me you were awake. And then you almost fucking killed me!” Hux bared his teeth, feeling like he was going to overflow. He didn’t _do_ emotions like this and yet here he was, shouting, hot faced and trembling.

“You think your magic is infallible? You dig in once— _without_ my permission—when you’re high off your ass and you think you know everything that I’ve felt? That I never cared, not even a little bit?”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that,” Kylo growled. “You still _used_ me.”

“Fine, then! Don’t believe I ever loved you,” he cut, his anger flash-freezing down to cruelty. “But never say I didn’t try to fix this. There’s no way in all hells I’m disabling those dampers for you, but you’d know if you looked again. I gave you a chance and if you aren’t going to take it, that’s your fault, Kylo.”

Kylo just stared, shocked into silence. Their eyes locked, each frozen in the other’s orbit, charged up and breathing hard.

“I’m leaving,” he announced.

He flicked off the microphone and spun on his heel, punching open the door. Flesh thumped on transparisteel behind him and he spared a moment to glance back as he went, seeing Kylo up against the pane again. He looked wild, but a different kind of wild, one absent of blood and tears and crushing hands: he looked human. Unbearably so. His expression morphed from anger to confusion and into desperation as he strained against the barrier, slamming at it with his palm as though he could break through using sheer force of will alone.

 _Wait!_ He shouted, inaudible, lips moving around impotent words. _Hux!_ _Don’t you fucking leave me here you-_

But the door was already sealing, another barrier locking closed between them. Hux sagged back against it, thumping his head on the durasteel. There was no one in the hall. There never was. It was factory-grade and and pin-straight, repetitive and gray, sterilely lit. He felt like he was looking at his own insides.

“ _Kriff_ ,” he hissed. He gripped his fingers into his hair and yanked, just to feel, to zero his attention back to something concrete and obvious and unquestionably simple. Pain was good for that.

He needed to walk away. Straighten himself up and get back to his schedule. That was what he had to do. He had to-

He still had some liquor in his quarters.

Fuck it. The Order wouldn’t fall apart if he disappeared for an hour or three. Or the whole evening.

So he turned off his comm and strode away, and then the hall was truly, silently empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS: Passive suicidal ideation, emotional manipulation.
> 
> Wow so they're both utter shitheads but Christ on a bicycle when did Kylo become the one with a more reasonable relationship assessment, what the fuck


	6. Probability Split

“Turn them off.”

“No.”

“Hux.”

“You’re just going to have to trust me.”

“Then trust me back first.”

“No. When _I_ gravely wounded you, it was in self-defense. The same can’t be said for what _you_ did.”

“I was… upset.”

“As is so typical for you.”

This time, Hux had ordered a chair brought in. He sat cross-legged in it while Kylo lay on his cot, one hand over his chest and the other flopped by his head, his left knee drawn up and leaned against the wall. The man had kept his gaze resolutely on the ceiling the whole time Hux had been here. It was obvious that he endured his presence grudgingly, given that he couldn’t dictate Hux’s comings and goings, but nonetheless he sensed a deep loneliness bleeding through Kylo’s terse attitude. He probably wouldn’t be talking otherwise.

Kylo sighed. “I don’t experience untruths when I read minds. It’s impossible.”

“The human brain is defined by selectivity. You see what you want to, what you’re looking for.”

“And you’re the absolutely least qualified person to lecture me on how the Force works.”

“But I know how people work. I know how _you_ work. You’re impulsive and self-destructive and do everything in extremes. People are fallible.”

Kylo finally looked at him. “I want to believe you. But I can’t. Not unless I _know_. And even if you do-“ And he choked over the words that would’ve gone there, empty holes in a broken universe- “even If you really do _feel_ for me, you still manipulated me. We started fucking because we fought all the time. We _hated_ each other. I don’t think we ever really stopped, not entirely, not even at the end.”

“Everyone’s guilty of hating something about other people,” Hux returned, a disproportionately weak response to a very loaded statement, and picked at his jacket hem. He could actually bend his arm now, D’Oro having cleared him of the brace yesterday. It was stupid, why he was back here again. So, so stupid. Because ultimately, Kylo wasn’t the only lonely one. Better the devil you know, he’d justified, than the devil you don’t. Besides, it wasn’t as though there was anyone else in the Order he could talk about personal issues with, if that’s what this could be considered. Phasma came close, but still nowhere near close enough. He’d never bothered much with a social life.

“What if I did turn them off?” Hux mused.

Kylo just looked at him, mouth abortively parting before he wet his lips.

“What would you do?” he pressed.

“You won’t, though. So it’s a worthless question.”

Hux sighed. “Perhaps. But entertain me. Would you break the transparisteel? Can you even do that with the Force?”

“I wouldn’t need to break it,” he growled. “You would open it for me.”

“And then what?” Hux pushed, one eybrow raised. “Would you still want to kill me?” Kylo took a moment before answering, the seconds dragging out.

“This is pointless.”

“Kylo.”

“ _Hux_ ,” he mocked, and turned back to the ceiling. But after a long pause of thought, he did answer. “…I think I’d leave.”

“Just like that?”

“I told you before. I don’t want anything to do with you or the Order anymore. Or the Empire, or whatever you’re calling it now.”

“Not even if I am telling the truth? If you could be sure?”

“Stars, what’s the _point_ of this, Hux?” A spike of that trademark anger struck through his words and then he was sitting up, elbow on knee, torso turned out, other hand braced behind him. “If you’re so curious, turn them off and find out for yourself!”

“No.” His gut lurched at the thought of actually doing so. Kylo groaned and stuck his hand in his hair, leaning on it as he tightened his fingers, still looking at Hux. It was longer now, falling in a tangled mane that reached past his collarbones.

“Did you ever go swimming as a child?” The question was abrupt, a sharp change of topic.

“What?”

“I said-“

“I know what you said.”

“Did you?”

“I- Yes. There was a pool at the Academy. Why?”

“It isn’t like being blind or deaf. It’s worse. It’s like submerging yourself in water and not being able to come back up. You can still see and hear and move, sort of, but everything beyond you is just… gray. You can’t breathe. You need air. Even if it’s foul and burns your lungs, you still need it.” Ah, Hux realized. He was talking about the Force.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Turn the dampers off.”

“No.”

“Then stop coming in here and _taunting_ me.”

“You don’t dictate what I do.”

“Don’t I, though?”

Hux snarled. “No. You don’t.”

Kylo sneered back and flopped down again, rolling to face the wall. Neither of them spoke again after that. Hux left ten minutes later.

 

 

\---

 

 

“What concerns me, your grace, is the frequency with which these evasive actions have been occurring, especially in systems connected non-linearly to those we already occupy,” his intelligence chief frowned. She leaned back in her chair, fingers steepled as usual. Only four of his six counselors were present this evening, as well as himself and Phasma. “Evidence suggests that what remains of the New Republic has managed to intercept our ship-to-ship transmissions and possibly ship-to-ground as well, but it’s far less likely.”

“That’s only possible if you already have the encryption codes, Mindov,” Hux prompted. “By what route would they have acquired them? Or might they be capable of forcing it?”

“Not unless they have the packet module, and even then it would be incredibly difficult. Blind approach cracking is practically impossible.”

Phasma chimed in with a dour look. “Even though we’ve stymied the post-Starkiller defection rates, rogue elements likely still remain within the ranks. It only takes one to leak a packet update or codes.”

Hux grimaced internally. He was proud of the loyalty instilled in the First Order’s personnel, whether it was those who’d come of age in exile like himself, his Stormtroopers, or the technicians and bureaucrats who made the entire machine run smoothly. He’d played a hefty part in ensuring it, acting as the face of the Order for so many years. He could theoretically tolerate the initial reluctance of recently annexed systems to commit themselves wholeheartedly to their cause, but that small mercy did not extend to anyone else. That he couldn’t make his security vacuum-tight rankled him.

“And you’ve tried changing the encryption scheme completely?” he asked.

“Yes. As far as we can tell, it’s had no effect. My assessment is that it’s a personnel leak.”

“Switch it again and monitor all transmissions from the technical staff. I want this person found. Phasma, you and I will look at reconfiguring deployments after this. Any other updates?

Mindov shook her head. “We still haven’t made any progress on pinning down the Jedi. The scavenger hasn’t shown up anywhere within our network since the calabrum plant failure, beyond unsubstantiated rumors. She’s quite the topic in certain circles. Nothing on Skywalker, either. Frankly, they’ve been uncannily quiet.”

“On the topic of calabrum, what’s our status on re-routing the supply chain?”

His logistics chief, a short man named Kolatt, leaned forward. “I’ve managed to triage demand for the remaining supply of completed weapons components. We should be able to return production to previous levels by early next week with increased calabrum input from secondary processing stations, and have those parts available to ship immediately upon fabrication. I’ve prioritized Mitaka’s fleet and others pushing on the Inner Rim, but there shouldn’t be much of a delay for our other divisions.”

“Good. Anyone have anything else?”

The conference went on until early nighttime, ending with Mindov and Kolatt and the others packing up their datapads and a service droid coming in to clean the table and sweep away their empty glasses. Hux and Phasma remained, sitting kitty corner to one another. He leaned back and gave the arms of his chair a squeeze, allowing his composure to loosen slightly in the absence of other company.

“I don’t like this. The New Republic has been too quiet for too long,” he started. “I’m not seeing the type of movements I’d expect from them offensively, given what we know about the state of their navy. All the evasion and defensive posturing doesn’t make sense. And this business in the Quelii Sector is discomforting. It could easily escalate.”

“I agree.” Phasma tapped her fingers on the shiny black tabletop, pondering for a moment. “We need to review everything. There’s some pattern we haven’t caught, but we will.”

“Let’s start with the Expansion Region deployments.”

 

 

\---

 

 

“I don’t want to talk today.”

Kylo looked wrecked, deep bags under his reddened eyes and his clothes rumpled beneath the gray duraweave blanket wrapped around his shoulders. A half-finished tray of food lay on the floor by the door. Hux was certain he hadn’t used the sonic once since his post-bacta tank washdown, and gave thanks that he couldn’t smell past the divider.

He didn’t have much time: he was due to meet with Phasma again in ten minutes to continue their tactical review. If she found out he was visiting Kylo on a semi-regular basis, he wouldn’t put it past her to march into the cell and shoot him in the head herself. While she did defer to Hux, she took her earned share of the power within the Order very seriously, and her disapproval of the man had always been palpable. It wouldn’t be entirely out of her rights to dispose of him after what he’d done.

“If you’re trying to feel better about yourself,” Kylo murmured, “I won’t help.” He glared at him from the cot, shrunken into himself and surly.

“You should clean yourself up.”

“Just _go!_ ” the man snapped, pulling the blanket even more tightly around himself. Hux could see his fingers straining inside it, worrying at the fabric.

“Fine,” he sighed. He stooped to the slot under the door and flipped it open, withdrawing the small comb he’d brought from his pocket and sliding it through. It hit the side of the tray with a plastic clack. Kylo didn’t move, vague puzzlement gracing his expression as he looked down at it and then up to Hux again. Hux didn’t linger, turning on his heel and leaving without a glance back.

 

 

\---

 

 

Hux drank again that night.

It wasn’t becoming a habit, he promised himself. It wasn’t. He could’ve had a smoke too if he’d wanted, without a shipboard air filtration system to worry about. But he hadn’t indulged in one in years, not since his last planetside leave as a lieutenant, and the lingering stench would just make him hate himself more in the morning.

Eventually he found himself in the ‘fresher staring intently at his own reflection, dressed down to just his singlet, white jodhpurs, and glass-black jackboots. He fidgeted with the tumbler between his thumb and forefinger as he leaned on the counter, sending it skidding it back and forth over the imitation-marble duraplast in a puddle of its own condensation. He’d finished off the last leftover shot or so of brandy hours ago, and had moved on to a particularly smooth rye whiskey he’d received as a gift from some forgettable planetary representative after his coronation. The glass was dirty by now, coated with the residue of multiple pours and hazed along the rim by dried saliva.

Hux generally wasn’t one for the mirror. So long as his hair cooperated into its part and he could ensure he hadn’t missed any stubble while shaving, he’d ever put much stock in examining one’s own reflection more than necessary. He’d never had time for it to become a habit anyway, racing from asleep to inspection-ready each morning at the Academy or too pressed to begin work at his later postings. Besides, vanity was unbecoming of a man of power.

He swayed and pressed in harder on the counter, dancing at that singular crossroads of drunk and tired where everything once familiar seemed foreign.

The dissociation was just strong enough to make it feel almost as though there were another man entirely staring back at him, locking gazes. One with two yellowish splotches still lingering on his neck, one over a lymph node and another behind his ear. The man would need a haircut soon, a loose strand hanging over his brows and the dark bags cradling his eyes. The Hux-reflection reached down with his free hand to his waist, tugging at the top of his trousers. Had he always been able to fit his hand between them and the skin of his hips so easily?

It was hard to recognize himself, this Hux staring back at him seeming like some version from a future he hadn’t consented to, a body that his mind hadn’t caught up with yet. An impression of _impendingness_ wracked him, unshakeable and persistent in his inebriated, loose-minded state. It seemed as though the universe hung in some sort of precarious stasis that could snap apart at any moment. It reminded him a bit of setting a datapad down half-off the edge of his desk only to have it clatter to the floor hours later, some minute imperfection in its balance gradually gathering enough inertia to translate and amplify into an irreversible tumble.

He swiped a shaky hand over his face and wished, with a sudden and crushing desire, that Kylo were here. That when the man had woken up Hux hadn’t frozen and brought it all crashing down on their heads, that he’d recovered and claimed his third of the trimvirate, that they’d found their rough-handed way into Hux’s bed again.

Kylo would gently take the glass from his hand, plucking it up with a decisiveness that brooked no argument as he leaned his warm bulk along Hux’s back and nestled his chin on his shoulder. He’d turn in and give Hux a nip, right under his jaw, and he’d melt into it and close his eyes and sigh. The man’s other hand would curl along his waist, tugging him away from the sink and out of the ‘fresher and he would go willingly, relieved to have the Knight— _his_ Knight now, titled once more by Hux and their ascendant empire—pull him out of his own head.

They would go over to the bed and Kylo would sit him on it and chide him irritably about the time and stars, Hux, _this_ is why you need someone to hold you down and tell you when to just _stop_ , and he would snipe back something inconsequential but the Knight would just topple him onto the sheets. He would marvel yet again at the fact that they’d _done_ it, that he had this man with his soft brown eyes and tumbling hair and the ripping teeth of a thousand predators closed away inside him looking down at him with _affection_ , something he thought he’d never have, not truly, not from anyone. And he’d suddenly realize for the umpteenth time that the affection was in _his_ chest too, it had been for a good long while now, and he’d smile tiredly and reach up and-

Someone was sobbing.

Hux tasted salt at the corner of his mouth and realized with a disgusted jolt that it was _him_ , ass on the floor and back scrunched up against the shower stall divider. They were big, ugly things, heaving up from his chest too powerfully to stifle. He gritted his teeth and let out a raw-edged scream through them, the fury arcing out into his body until he hurled the glass up and away from himself. It shattered on the mirror into a thousand sparkling little pieces, most clattering into the sink, others tinkling down around him.

He didn’t _cry_. He was acting like how _Kylo_ would, angry in failure. Hux was the Order, and the Order did not falter, the Order did not become distracted with _personal concerns,_ the Order showed no weakness. Snoke could not have remained in command, content to mete out punishments in the wake of Starkiller while simultaneously neglecting the substantive needs of the organization that supported him. The New Republic could not be let to stand, and so Hux had acted. Initiated a relationship. Manipulated. _Deceived_.

The ends justified the means. He’d done what was _right._

Hadn’t he?

“Fuck,” he breathed out, and staggered back out into the bedroom.

He’d fucked up. He’d started fucking up a long time ago. He’d just been too stubborn to see it.

All his mantras and assurances felt empty now, as hollow as row upon row of voided compartments. He collapsed on his sheets without even taking off his boots, too drained to do anything but lie there in long-deferred compunction. It quickly transformed into pure drunken exhaustion, and he managed to muster up just enough energy to kill the lights before passing out.

 

 

The high-priority chime of his comm jarred him awake, the incessant tone impossible to ignore even in his semi-conscious haze. It was the one thing that would still get through even if he’d powered it off. He groaned and rolled over to his nightstand where it rested, fumbling about in the pitch darkness until he managed to grab it. The illumination of the screen made him squint uncomfortably as he unlocked it and opened the message blinking at the center of the image, marked as sent from Mindov.

_Skywalker located. Axion Sector, Ronag III. Request your immediate presence at Tactical Command._

They’d finally found the Jedi?

He’d thrown off the covers, called for fifty percent lights, and stripped himself of the wrinkled clothes he’d fallen asleep in before his mind caught up enough to even check the time. He grabbed a fresh uniform from his closet and then leaned to peer at the chrono by his bedside, mechanically tucking in the undershirt and shrugging the jacket over his shoulders. He’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, the readout saying 0352. No wonder he still felt a cottony fog in his head, the lingering inebriation just on the edge of tipping into hangover. He tried desperately not to think about it. He swung into the ‘fresher and splashed his face with bracingly cold water, the shock helping clear some of it away.

Hux strode the short distance between his residence and the Tactical Command building alone. It was cold at night on Balchorra, the twin moons casting him in double shadow as he moved between the trapezoidal architecture of the complex. He was glad to reach the blast doors of the fortified building, the two night shift Stormtroopers snapping to attention as he passed between them and into the warmer interior air. It was only a brief walk from there into the command room proper, which was laid out similarly to the bridge of a destroyer. A slightly raised walkway ran the perimeter of the domed, windowless room, studded with doors to private offices above which were mounted primary display screens. At the very center was a large holotable, currently displaying a galaxy map with tactical placements noted in glowing red and blue. Ranks of consoles, personal screens, and comm banks surrounded it. The low hum of conversation dipped only slightly when he entered, few of the night shift personnel turning from their work.

Mindov stood waiting at the holotable. Hux strode down to join her, grateful that the dim light in the kept the throbbing behind his eyes to a minimum.

“I’m assuming you’ve paged the Grand Admiral as well?” he asked.

“Yes, your grace.”

“Pull the regional map up,” he ordered. “We’ll begin when she gets here.”

Phasma arrived only a minute later, quickly descending to join them in the pit. She too looked freshly roused from sleep, but the only overt indication of it was a flyaway across her forehead. Hux had opted for his white command cap instead of the circlet, the better hide his own hastily groomed hair under. There was unfortunately nothing to be done about his stubble, however.

“We confirmed his whereabouts just before I commed you,” Mindov started, zooming in on the Axion Sector and indicating the planet. The glow bathed the side of her sharp face in green and blue, glinting off her narrow teeth as she spoke. “Ronag III is sparsely populated and off the beaten track, but as you know we’ve had a small garrison stationed there for the last seven months.”

Hux nodded. It was an occupational force, just enough to keep the local government under their heel. The place was of little strategic consequence on its own, but holding a wide net of small, relatively overlooked planets had allowed them to stage more efficient assaults on higher priority targets nearby.

“We’re not sure of his purpose for being there, but it’s definitely him. It’s been confirmed through both eyewitness accounts and holorecorder footage taken in the capitol city. It looks as though he’s searching for someone or something, asking questions of locals.” Mindov swiped up the silent recording, showing a short, heavily bearded man with his hair pulled back conversing with a trunked alien. He suddenly turned and drew at the motion of another being of indeterminate species rushing up behind him, the unmistakable flash of lightsaber ignition filling the view momentarily. And then it was gone, what had to be a bounty hunter left writhing on the ground as Skywalker exited the frame.

“We need to ensure that he can’t break orbit,” Hux stated. “Let’s move quickly.”

Phasma turned to address Mindov. “Exactly how old is this footage?”

“Twenty one minutes now, accounting for transmission lag,” she answered, checking her wrist chrono. Hux zoomed back the holotable, flicking up a deployments overlay and calculating the hyperspace jump time between Ronag III and potential responder vessels. Satisfied, he broke away to one of the comm banks.

“Petty Officer,” he ordered, and internally commended the poor man there on mostly managing to suppress his flinch. “Contact the CO on Ronag III and have them put the spaceport on lockdown. I want all available troops on alert, but order them _not_ to engage. We don’t want to spook our target.”

“Sir!” the man acknowledged, adjusting his headset and tapping out the connection coordinates.

“We’ll send the _Retribution_ ,” Hux said, turning back to Mindov and Phasma and indicating the nearest _Resurgent-_ class destroyer to the sector, which was was currently deployed about midway between Balchorra and Ronag III. “She and her accompanying ships carry enough power to quarantine the planet, should Skywalker attempt to leave.” He would have preferred to send a different vessel from further afield, but the time it would take to mobilize another destroyer would exceeded their critical window.

Phasma nodded. “I’ll contact Captain Alvey and brief him and his lieutenants on using the mobile dampers.” She took a step away and started speaking in clipped tones into her comm, organizing an express cargo cruiser to be loaded with a set of the devices. Mindov made eye contact with Hux and gave a short nod, moving to relay his orders to the rest of the room.

Hux massaged at his temple, suppressing a groan, and moved out of the pit onto the catwalk. It was definitely a hangover now, a pounding reminder of his weakness and susceptibility. He ground his molars together and stood up straighter, refusing to let it show. They had a real, tangible opportunity to eliminate Skywalker on their hands, a goal that had been elusive for so long now. While he didn’t care if the Jedi was killed on contact, capturing him instead would be exceptional. He could make his death a spectacle, broadcast to the entire galaxy to send the message that no, not even the New Republic’s so-called heroes were safe from the Order’s hand.

Should he tell Kylo? That his uncle, the one he’d never really gotten him to open up about, was so close to falling into their hands? Hux shook his head and tried to put it out of his mind. Now was not the time. He didn’t even think he could bear to face him, not after the regret knifing into his side last night.

Lieutenant Ibris appeared forty five minutes later, exactly on time for the start of his shift at 0500. Hux didn’t even bother with his usual curt greeting of him by name, instead snapping at him for caf and painkillers. The man turned away and hustled right back out of the room before he even had time to come to a stop. Eventually he returned with a breakfast trolley as well, a welcome break from the tense waiting. There was nothing more proactive to do besides monitor until the _Retribution_ arrived at her destination, which would take several hours. Hux slowly began to feel more like himself again, his mind clearer and body no longer running entirely on empty.

At 0712, a communications officer called him over.

“Sir,” the man began, his expression concerned. “We’ve failed to receive a per-cycle status transmission from the _Finalizer_. The cutoff is 0700, and they haven’t responded to my subsequent hailing attempts.”

Hux frowned. “When did they last transmit?”

“Yesterday at 1630, a report that they’d arrived at Thyferra. Prior to that was the standard check in that morning.”

“Hail them again.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mitaka wouldn’t fail the check in protocol. Not unless something was very, very wrong. His hands curled into fists and he took a half-lap around the room. Minutes dragged on without a response.

“Emperor Hux, sir,” came a call from another officer at the other end of the bank. Her voice was too quick, too strained. “I’m receiving an incoming transmission from the light cruiser _Tracer_ , assigned to the _Finalizer_ ’s fleet. They’re saying-” she paused for a moment, lips slightly parted in concentration as she pressed her headset to her ear. “They’re saying that she’s gone, sir. The _Finalizer_ and the majority of her fleet. An ambush once they’d fallen into Thyferra’s orbit. The New Republic used the planet’s gravity well to mask their heavy artillery jumps.” The officer made eye contact with him, expression tight. “They’ve been trying to get through for at least eight hours, but the frequency’s been jammed.”

What? _How?_ A sinking sense of loss hit him, unexpected in its magnitude, for a kriffing _ship_.

He spun around to the holotable, eyes flicking over the illuminated blips of vessels. He swiped the _Finalizer_ away, breath accelerating as he realized what he was looking at. The three repurposed _Imperator-_ class and two _Resurgent-_ class destroyers hanging above Balchorra, one of them the _Adjudicator_ , still lacking their long-delayed weapon repairs _._ The _Retribution_ moving away on its projected path towards Ronag III, nearly there now. All his other deployments, far-flung from here. The conspicuous blank space in which the _Finalizer_ had been, what had always been _his_ ship, in spirit if not in practice. Organa’s fleet hanging silent in the Quelii Sector.

This was not a coincidence. He’d been _played_.

Eight hours. She had said eight hours. How long would it take for this Republican fleet, which he apparently _had not known about_ and had managed to destroy the _Finalizer_ , to make the jump from Thyferra to Balchorra? He flicked up the calculation, and paled.

“Recall the _Retribution_ ,” he ordered. “Now!”

Phasma had found her way to his side, and they exchanged tense glances.

“They- we’ve lost the frequency, sir.”

 _Shit_.

“We need to mobilize,” she deadpanned to him. Hux nodded. If the New Republic had the packet codes and the capacity to jam hyperspace transmissions from vessels afield, they had to assume the bastards could also do it in the other direction. And that meant they had Balchorra’s coordinates.

“Everyone out,” Hux ordered, his voice solid ice. “Evacuate yourselves and all other relevant planetside personnel to your assigned shipboard stations. As of this moment we are under naval engagement protocols.” The room exploded into a flurry of movement, officers making urgent calls to their sections and gathering their things. He grabbed at the shoulder of a radio and telemetry technician just as he moved to stand, slamming him back down in his chair.

“Give me the status on the fleet in the Quelii Sector,” he demanded, and the man hurriedly pulled it up. Sure enough they were moving, the signatures of engine radiation and cycling hyperdrives unmistakable. He spun away and marched up out of the pit towards the door.

Ibris materialized at his side, hand gripped tight around his comm. “Your shuttle will be waiting at the courtyard launch pad,” he relayed. “They’re ready whenever you are.”

“Good.” Ibris was about to step away when Hux stopped him. “And Lieutenant,” he added, voice dangerous. “Bring Kylo Ren aboard as well. Safely. Sedate him, whatever you have to do. I won’t leave him planetside for them to capture, should it come to that.” Ibris nodded tightly, his grim expression matching Hux’s own.

By the time he swept aboard his _Upsilon_ shuttle, Hux had allowed restrained rage to fester inside him. Which tactical decisions in the last months bore the most responsibility for the situation he now found himself in, cornered into a confrontation on his own turf? Could this have been avoided with the strange prescience of a Force user? He sneered at the thought and strapped himself into the jump seat for takeoff, pushing it out of mind. It didn’t matter. He could deal with hindsight and datapads teetering on the edges of desks later, once this mess was resolved. He may be caught on the back foot, but he would lay down his life for the Order against Organa and the corruption of the New Republic.

He was going to blow them out of the sky.

The shuttle rumbled and lifted, hurtling off planet and into the black towards the glinting sliver of the _Adjudicator_.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Buckle up folks, we're rolling into the finale.
> 
> This was an unexpectedly long and difficult chapter to finish, so I wanted to give a huge shoutout to everyone who's given kudos or left a comment so far! Knowing that people enjoy this is what keeps me writing. That and copious amounts of synthwave and retro electro.


	7. Hot Dice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all your patience and the occasional prod with this chapter!

Hux bypassed the flight bridge entirely upon arrival, reporting directly to Battle Command instead. Admiral Vries, who commanded the _Adjudicator_ and her fleet during Hux’s absence or preoccupation, would join him there in the heart of the ship once combat lockdown triggered. It wouldn’t be long.

The familiar hum of the destroyer’s systems resonated through him as he strode into the dim space, bootheels hard on the slick-shine floor. Even here, in the most heavily fortified location aboard, the throb of her massive reactor beat in time with his heavy pulse. It radiated through his chest and gave heft to his anger, each and every soul and system aboard primed and ready to transform his will into lethal action. He hoped this power, _his_ power, as caught-out as it was, would be enough.

“Status report,” he demanded, gesturing at the nearest lieutenant. She snapped a perfect salute.

“Shields at one hundred percent, sir. All operable turbolaser batteries and ion cannons are ready and standing by. No signs of Republican activity yet, but we’ve calculated their arrival in fifteen to thirty minutes.” The room was bustling, personnel still reporting in and falling into their stations. The panoramic holoscreens booted up silently and threw them all from a darkened room into space, the view a live feed from recorders ringing the flight bridge. The _Adjudicator_ ’s mass stretched out into a fine point before him, sharp as a vibroblade against the stars and Balchorra’s blue-brown disc below.

“Organize the fleet into defensive flanking formation,” Hux ordered. It was all they’d have time for, and there was no way to predict with any meaningful notice where the enemy would drop out of hyperspace. Orders were relayed over open channels and slowly the other destroyers fell into position, their thrusters burning low in anticipation.

They waited. Hux’s nails nearly cut through the leather of his gloves. And then-

There.

High off their starboard side, a ship dropped into real space. It was a far sliver, much too distant to engage, but unmistakably the shape of a Republican capitol ship. A second and a third warped in after it, followed by a syncopated flurry of smaller vessels. Telemetry showed them closing, but very slowly. Noncommittally.

“Your grace, I’m receiving a request to open a holochannel with the NRS _Vigilant_ ,” relayed a comm technician.

“Deny it,” Hux growled. He’d passed the point of talking the moment the _Finalizer_ had flickered off the map. He knew their game, and at this point it was to stall for time. By his calculations, the Republican reinforcements inbound from Thyferra could arrive no earlier than forty seven minutes from now, assuming they’d started their jump immediately after the engagement there. He could approach the current match with a reasonable chance of success as long as they executed it efficiently. But if they failed to inflict sufficient vessel casualties within that window, the moment the second fleet dropped in their likelihood of coming out victorious dropped drastically. Every scrap of time counted.

“It’s from General Organa herself, sir-”

“I said _deny it_ ,” he snapped, leveling a scowl he’d once made a man piss himself with at the tech. “Or did I not make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Move all units to engage,” he barked, and triggered lockdown. Claxons blared briefly to alert the crew of the shift, the flight bridge and other vulnerable sectors sealing off and all non-critical power redirecting to combat systems. Admiral Vries arrived shortly thereafter and Hux immediately turned the _Adjudicator_ ’s conn over to him, confident in his abilities to command the flagship through the impending battle.

He had the bigger picture to concern himself with.

There was a reason Hux had delayed engaging with the Quelii Sector fleet, hoping to fully complete their repairs before locking horns with what he was still sure made up a majority of the Republic’s remaining ships. They needed to win this fight. Losing would mean the certain dissolution of the Order as an empire, scattering the millions under its banner back out into the Unknown Regions without a centralized command. The idea made Hux’s blood boil, with both rage and threatened pride. But winning… winning could mean victory. _True_ victory, the elimination of the last stumbling block between him and the galaxy resting neatly in the palm of his hand. Without a navy, not even the Jedi would be able to stop him.

So much depended on this, and he’d been forced to play his hand early.

The moment they were within targeting range, he ordered the first volley of turbolaster bursts. They shot across the starscape from his five destroyers in unison, followed by swarms of TIE Fighters arcing off. The other _Resurgent-_ class and two _Imperator-_ class destroyers split off to port and starboard, moving with their accompanying lighter vessels to flank. Thirty six minutes left, and they had yet to satisfactorily close the gap. He resisted the urge to pace.

Soon two tiny X-Wings shot across their bow, one puffing into a hurtling ball of debris and quick burning flame as a laser caught its chassis, and then abruptly they were in the thick of it, the holoscreens erupting with the visual chaos of close-quarters engagement. The dogfighting between starfighters clogged their visual information, but radiation and other readings confirmed that the Republicans were attempting to press the diffusion advantage with their comparatively smaller but more numerous capitol ships. He reconfigured his tactical display, slipping into that fraught battlefield mindspace where his brain proliferated decision trees and contingencies almost too quickly to evaluate. Twenty eight minutes.

Vries wrested the _Adjudicator_ through a narrow evasion of a pincer attack from three Republican destroyers, but her accompanying _Imperial_ -class was not so lucky. Her ventral shields flickered violently out under a concentrated barrage of ion cannon fire, sustaining heavy damage to her starboard side and listing hard, finally rending apart with an ice-white outgassing of atmosphere. Vries subsequently annihilated two of the three assailants in a blazing glory of tactical efficiency despite their firepower handicap, rolling the _Adjudicator_ momentarily above the fray. Nineteen minutes.

Hux didn’t even feel the slam they took to their dorsal shields, alerted to it only by the engineering lieutenant’s shout that they’d reduced to seventy percent. It was the _Vigilant_ , swarmed in X-Wings, drawing near and silhouetted against Balchorra’s day side. Hux overrode Vries and redirected his two remaining _Imperator-_ class destroyers back to the _Adjudicator_ to push from below, and deployed a second wave of TIEs to clear the flies. Another Republican destroyer went down behind them, leaving six remaining. Eleven minutes.

Organa’s ship re-engaged, the two vessels trading bombardments with abandon. Hux rallied the remaining light cruisers and frigates to supplement their reduced firepower as the volley dragged on, forcing their assailant to veer off to maintain her defenses. She slipped through Hux’s net at the last moment with a particularly clever maneuver, forcing him to redirect to other targets or risk unacceptable losses from friendly fire. Two enemy capitol ships succumbed and blew to scrap at close quarters, their twisted shrapnel fizzling and rebounding off the _Finalizer’s_ shields for long moments after the explosions exhausted themselves. Three minutes.

Hux leaned hard on the tactical console, brows down and eyes glued to the holoscreens. The adrenaline of combat thrummed under the bustle of Battle Command, but he suddenly felt chilled, the anger fueling his breakneck orders running into cold dread. Four Republican destroyers remained. Too many. Too little _time_.

Zero minutes.

Where were they? Hux looked up, expectant, at the panorama of the engagement. It always had an air of unreality for him, watching on projections rather than through triple layered panes of transparisteel, and hearing nothing but voices and beeping alerts. Nothing else penetrated, certainly not the nonexistent noise of mechanical carnage in a vacuum. Vries rolled the ship again and another enemy destroyer exploded into silent oblivion.

Two minutes passed. Then four. The chaos outside continued, unchanged. Hope swelled up in him again, his mental iterations of the conflict suddenly predicting better outcomes. Had he miscalculated? How much time did he actually have? Their other _Resurgent_ -class destroyer annihilated yet another vessel, leaving just the _Vigilant_ and a final member of her vanguard. Two left. Was this a brink they could pull back from?

“Starboard quarter, sir!” shouted an officer, and both he and Vries whirled around. Two, three more capitol ships were dropping out of hyperspace and they were _close_ , already firing, the shots wearing dangerously at their shields, dropping them to twenty percent.

Kriff. It wasn’t, was it.

“Disengage!” Hux roared. But the Republicans beat them to the punch, soaring past on the holoscreens and opening a divide. A flare of confusion hit him as they went. Why would they-

And then, with a flurry of crackling sparks, everything went black. Truly black, the kind that sent flashes of phantom color across Hux’s retinas as he strained to pick up any sort of light. Panicked shouts rang through the room and all of a sudden he felt with absolute certainty that he was falling, his stomach lurching up, vestibular system disorienting. He lunged for where he thought the nearest console was only to have his feet leave the floor uselessly, his body floating in place.

No gravity. The hum of his ship’s systems, that reverberation that meshed with his sinews and he could direct like a symphony, had stuttered into deathly silence. They’d suffered a total and complete power loss. How in all hells had they-

A magnepulse detonation? It suddenly clicked, why the incoming ships from Thyferra had made a pass and then scattered. It was a rare, unconventional tactic that was notoriously difficult to pull off at scale, but it was the only explanation. The pulse had been _powerful_. It meant no propulsion. No weapons. No _shields_. They’d be lucky to even get comms back. He nearly lost it then and there, the urge to curse and scream with frustration so, so close to shattering his composure in the dead, weightless darkness.

Dull white emergency lights flickered on, followed only a second later by the gravity slamming back. Hux caught himself hard on a hand and a knee, the impact throbbing with the surety of deep bruising. The holoscreens had completely blown, smoke from their charred emitters adding to the thin haze slowly migrating to the ceiling where it belonged. Acrid, metallic fumes hit his lungs as he hissed in a breath and pushed himself up, taking stock of his personnel, most of whom were also coming back to their feet. No one seemed hurt.

“Status report!” he shouted. The hum of life support kicked back in too, a literal breath of fresh air sucking out the smoke.

“Primary reactor is offline, we’re running on backup generators.”

“Attempting to redirect power to shields!”

“Telemetry is completely down, but we have comms. I’m attempting to reestablish contact with the rest of the fleet!”

“Weapons at seven percent capacity. Working on reacquiring targeting-”

Everything suddenly lurched, the floor going out from Hux’s feet again for a horrible moment before righting itself. A nearly subsonic rumble shook through the framing, resonating in his chest as he staggered. The rest of the bridge crew felt it too, that was obvious, every single person falling into dead silence for a beat. No one said it, but everyone knew. That had been a hull impact. A large one.

“We’ve lost the two portmost Gemon-8 engines and a KDY engine, as well as our port shield generator,” the engineering lieutenant breathed after a fraught moment, analytics flashing past. “I can’t redirect enough emergency power to complete the field using the other two generators without compromising life support, sir.”

Hux opened his mouth before realizing, quite jarringly, that he had no decisive order to give. Shield themselves for the time being and suffocate slowly to death, or continue to breathe freely until their atmosphere voided through a hole punched by a missile or turbolaser? He swallowed, throat dry, confronted by the reality of their situation and the stomach-dropping clarity that he had no option but to accept it. A forced gamble, utterly lost. And he’d run out of chips to bet.

Thirty pairs of eyes remained fixed on their Emperor, their owners’ silence only stretching the taught atmosphere further. Hux gripped the edge of the smoking console as though he could squeeze the life out of it and drew himself up straighter, his free hand fixing his collar. One flight sergeant all the way across the room sat with a palm clamped over her mouth, a stray twist of hair out of regulation and entirely forgotten. Admiral Vries’s look was too bright, his lips slightly parted. The petty officer directly to his right stared up at him as though in prayer, the transfixed fear in his eyes edging on supplication, calling upon him, the Order, the entire _universe_ to realign into a configuration where he wasn’t certain his life was over. Hux had to make a call.

“Don’t bother with the shields,” he finally ordered, forcibly calm above the rage and loss and pain he wanted to scream out. “Put what resources we can into salvaging propulsion without impeding critical systems.” Organa, bafflingly, hadn’t ordered another strike yet despite their total vulnerability. What was keeping her?

“Sir,” came the shaky voice of the comms officer. “I’m receiving another request to open a holochannel with the NRS _Vigilant._ ” The beep of the transmission notification seemed piercingly loud in the stillness. Hux shuddered out a breath and dropped into parade rest, adjusting the set of his cap back to perfection.

So she wanted to _talk_.

“Accept it.”

The projection system struggled valiantly to life, spared from the magnepulse since it hadn’t been in use at the time. Even so, it only succeeded in producing a grainy, half-glitched image of the straight backed, tight-lipped woman above the now-destroyed tactics display. It looked washed-out against the reflections of emergency lights on plasteel behind it. Her voice crackled as it came through, but that inflection was unmistakable.

“Emperor Hux.” His lip curled at the disapproval in her tone, his title treated like profanity.

“Organa.”

“This is your opportunity to surrender,” she offered. “I’m not presenting it lightly.”

He barely suppressed an involuntary break in composure, a barking laugh stuck in his throat. It was not hysterics. It _wasn’t._ He sneered, allowing the fury to externalize on his face instead, blade-sharp and burning.

“The Order will not be cowed by you unprincipled scum,” he snarled. “You’ve wasted your time in asking.”

“As a final courtesy, then, be aware that you’ll be boarded shortly. I’d advise you to comply with our troops.”

“What, you haven’t the conviction to end this here and now? How typical of the Republican sentiment,” he scoffed.

“The galaxy deserves restitution for the destruction you’ve wrought,” she snapped back. “And that will begin with fair trials for you and your ilk in a Republican court.” And then she was gone, the holo blinking out, leaving nothing but blank space. He trembled, the creak of his gloves a poor substitute for the bones he found himself itching to snap.

“Emperor, sir,” Vries was saying, suddenly close. “There’s still time. We need to evacuate you-”

“Absolutely not. Not yet.”

“Your grace-”

“ _No_ , Admiral. We stand our ground. Inform Phasma of the situation and prepare to defend incursion points.”

He refused to abandon his post and give up the _Adjudicator_. It was a matter of principle at this point, born of anger and pride because only a fool would deny the inevitable outcome of their current situation, attempting to operate a disabled ship with the enemy about to flood its decks. His crew would hold out for as long as they could and take as many Republican casualties with them as possible, but they’d lost. _He_ had lost.

Vries drew back, a look of bare-edged determination on his face. Hux recognized it: it was one he’d worn many times himself during his career, one he’d fallen into when given a command from a superior that he’d followed because it was an order and his job had been to _trust_ , no matter his personal reservations. Vries turned and strode back amongst the bridge crew and the room grew loud with activity once more, leaving Hux standing in a bubble of his own.

He turned on his heel and left Battle Command. No one stopped him. The moment he emerged alone into the vestibule he broke composure, letting out a short, ragged scream punctuated by his cap slapping into the wall and his fingers wrenching into his own hair for the second time in the past twelve hours. He’d fucking _lost_. Shame roiled through him under the fury, and _stars_ did it burn.

It had all happened so _fast,_ a sudden and complete ripping apart his life’s work. This was worse than Starkiller: this was the whole _Order_ , its fleet decimated and its leadership to follow.  Oh, how _pleased_ Organa must be to have the New Republic’s three most sought after political targets packaged neatly for the taking and one of them, as she would find out, clearly not as dead as assumed. He doubted Phasma would allow herself to be captured alive, preferring a bolt to binders. And Kylo-

Kylo.

Oh, _shit_.

The power failure. The _dampers_. Had they blown, too? If so then Kylo could be anywhere, unbeholden to anyone and certainly not likely to care about causing more damage. He had to find him. He had no kriffing idea what he’d do beyond that, but he couldn’t just leave him for the Republicans to run across, because they _would_ take him. He had to assume they had a description of his appearance without the mask after Starkiller, one made doubly unmistakable by his familial resemblance.

Hux ran a glove harshly down his face, a weak laugh bubbling up and out. The New Republic had already taken Starkiller, the _Finalizer,_ and the rest of his fleet from him, and he’d be damned if they took anything else without him defending it by tooth and nail first. There was nothing more he could do here at Battle Command anyway, not anymore. How long they’d be able to hold out ultimately came down to the caliber and training of his crew. So he huffed a shaky exhale, palmed the grip of the blaster reassuringly at his hip, and started walking.

He moved quickly, the companionways in barely constrained chaos around him. Stormtrooper squadrons rushed on the double to defend the hangar bays, followed by less organized clumps of enlisted crew. Even the few engineering officers he saw go by were armed, one with what may have been an autowrench. They all cleared out of his way with astonishing speed, startled gazes lingering, before hurrying on. He wondered what he looked like right now to them. Manic, probably, compared to his public image.

Soon the rush of people thinned to barely anyone, his footsteps taking him off from the main thoroughfares of the ship and into the detention block nestled centrally within her bulk. The cycling air smelled of disinfectant and floor polish here, the too-clean framing and walls belying both newness and the necessity of frequent cleaning. Hux’s eyes swept the Aurebesh over each cell door as he hurried under row upon row of dull emergency lights, searching for the one Ibris had sent him the number of what seemed like far more than several hours ago. A breach alarm began blaring from somewhere far away through the half-lit corridors, echoing past into a jumbled fade of sonic reflections.

No sign of Kylo yet, which boded either well or very, very poorly.

There. On the right up ahead Hux caught a coughing, sputtery hum beneath the noise of the claxon, and its source came into view as he cleared a service alcove: one of Jarlsson’s portable damper units. He crouched down to examine it, running his glove over the power cell socket and feeling it shake. The strange machinery looked solidly on the wrong side of worse for wear, but it struggled along valiantly nonetheless. He let himself breathe a thin sigh of relief. Kylo could still be here. He rose back to his feet and moved on at a jog, certain that the man’s cell was close.

It didn’t take long to find. The control panel for the door had shorted, char marks scarring the durasteel around what had once been a biometric authenticator, rendering it useless. Hux growled, stripped off his gloves to operate his pistol and blew the damn thing off entirely, the small explosion sending a sliver of shrapnel slicing across his cheekbone despite the arm he’d raised to shield himself. He sneered and wiped the back of his hand across the cut, his skin coming away bright and bloody.

Every moment he wasted was another one given to the Republicans, and even if he’d had time to really consider what he was doing from a personal safety standpoint, Hux wouldn’t have wanted it. He just needed to _find him._ He holstered his pistol, freeing both hands to grab the crater where the panel had been and attempt to jerk it open. The first few pulls were hell, the thing barely budging, but once he got it past more than a handful of centimeters it tripped the pneumatics and the whole thing slid back with a hiss to reveal-

Nothing.

Cot, toilet, sink. Deep shadows pooling at the inverse of the single weak light in the corner of the ceiling. But no Kylo.

“Kriffing hells,” Hux swore under his breath. Had he mistaken the cell number? No, he wouldn’t just _forget_ something like that, and the Aurebesh did match. Or was Kylo simply not here anymore, by some continuously horrid streak of fate? He re-armed himself and took a cautions step inside just to be sure, sweeping the room.

It was a mistake.

Suddenly his blaster was gone, snapped from his grip before his brain could process the blur of motion or the shoulder in his chest that immediately followed. He barely even had time to stumble before he was sent spinning, destabilized by a sharp tug upwards beneath one knee and the loss of his other foot from under him. He cried out and hit the floor of the corridor hard, face down, his assailant’s weight slamming down upon him before he could move to scramble away. One unforgiving kneecap pinned him at the small of his back, and both of the man’s hands locked Hux’s head down against the durasteel.

He couldn’t turn to see his face, but he knew that grip intimately and it was Kylo’s, oh _hells_ , it was Kylo’s. His pulse slammed horribly at the recognition. He could practically feel the sticky pool of blood smearing against his cheek, the taste of it at the corner of his mouth, the tangy odor of fresh viscera hitting his nostrils. His shoulder throbbed. He thrashed and struggled and gasped but he was trapped and it was happening all over again, _fuck,_ he was going to hyperventilate, he was going to-

“…Hux?”

Kylo eased off, his tone surprised and uncertain, but nowhere near quickly enough. Hux lashed out at the first moment he could, a vicious rolling swing with his elbow, succeeding only in landing a glancing strike to the man’s cheekbone. He recoiled with a yelp and something clattered across the floor but Hux’s attention was elsewhere, laser focused on tracking Ren’s destabilized inertia while scrambling simultaneously away. He hit the opposite bulkhead and braced there, nerves arcing in panic and his breaths staccato-quick.

Kylo stumbled up and back until he managed to ground himself again near the open doorway, slightly off kilter with his bare arms locked in binders in front of him. A good stride and he’d be right back in Hux’s space. Clean but messy hair and skin offset the perpetual bags under his eyes, and he’d gained new clothes at some point in the last twenty-four hours as well, a fresh set of scrubs covering his broad shoulders. He looked wrong in them, though, the pale fabric fitting not-quite-right over his bulk and exacerbating how the strip lights washed out his skin.

The last positive memory Hux had of him in his real clothes, those damnably dirty, ragged tunics and coats that he’d always wanted to rip him out of before the grime migrated onto his own uniform, had been months ago. They’d fucked languidly in his quarters aboard the _Finalizer_ after Kylo had returned from the last mission Snoke had ever sent him on. He’d been filthy, the surcoat’s tails soaked in cold, tacky blood and leaving goopy smears wherever they brushed. Afterwards they’d showered together and whispered treasons, Kylo nibbling at his neck as his big hands pawed through his hair.

Longing panged sharp-edged in his chest at the recollection, and he welcomed the hurt this time. He deserved it. Maybe if he felt it enough, it would stop lancing at him, but right now he couldn’t bear to look at his face, no matter the potential threat he posed. He skimmed the hall while keeping his silent form in his peripheral, at least until he caught the plastic shine of something lying between them on the floor.

The- the comb? He’d kept it? Of course he would have, Hux rationalized. Kylo held basic necessities in well-deserved high regard, a product of his training. It probably had nothing to do with the fact that he had given it to him, just yesterday. It felt so much longer than that, now. Besides, Kylo had made it abundantly clear he wanted nothing to do with him, and yet here Hux was, chasing after him anyway.

“Hux.”

He snapped back to Kylo to find the man’s attention fixed on him from beneath unkempt locks, sending his breath hitching faster again with a jolt of hindbrain-bound fear.

“Why did you-” Kylo started, but stopped himself. He swallowed hard and glanced away down the corridor, his shocked incredulity slipping into deep concern as he evaluated the alarms and half-functioning systems. He looked back to Hux, still deeply wary but much more collected. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve been boarded,” he managed to respond after moment, barely keeping the quivery huff from his voice. He assumed Kylo could infer the rest, putting two and two together with the gravity loss and the hull impact he’d surely also felt.

“What the hell did you do?” Kylo demanded, his attention flickering down again towards the intersection at the end of the wing, his set that of a wild creature suddenly unsure whether it was predator or prey. It was jarring, to see that doubt him.

“It’s the _Vigilant_.”

Though intended as a deflection, it perhaps served as more of an answer than he’d intended. They both knew the _Vigilant_ was Organa’s flagship, her equivalent of the _Adjudicator_ after the Republic had officially claimed the Resistance and brought them under both their regulation and full funding. Hux had long considered her amongst the very few people in the Galaxy to be truly wary of, and she hadn’t disappointed on that front. He realized that no individual thing he’d done as Emperor—save, perhaps, for this perpetual _involvement_ with Kylo—could be called a mistake, per se. He’d simply been outmaneuvered by a seasoned opponent, his own shortcomings withstanding or not.

Kylo’s gaze went far away for a beat, his face falling into that pensive, microexpression-laden look he got when piecing together implications. The moment dragged on and Hux’s heartrate finally managed to drop to something that didn’t resemble imminent cardiac arrest. If Kylo were going to follow through and kill him properly this time, he’d still be pinned breathlessly to the floor with his temple grinding into the polish. Though rumpled, the man seemed far more stable than the last time he’d seen him, so he felt he could put reasonable surety into that assessment.

“So she’s here. My- Organa,” Kylo stumbled.

“Yes. Presumably.”

“Is she coming aboard?”

“I don’t know.”

Hux finally managed to get his feet back under himself, rising to come level with the other man. He licked his lips and took a cautious stride forward over the comb, hand outstretched. The white detailing of his lost sidearm contrasted starkly with the polished black of the floor just next to the man’s slippered foot.

There was no time to acknowledge fear right now, and even less to try to make things right between them.

“I can’t just leave you here for them, Kylo. We’re going. Let me have my blaster.”

“No.”

“ _No?”_ There it was again, the anger, surging up over the guilt. “Don’t be ridiculous-”

“I’m not!” Kylo snarled indignantly, stepping backwards in a mirror of Hux’s advance. “You expect me to just do whatever you say, after all you’ve put me though?”

“Would you rather try your chances with the New Republic and their Resistance, then? Organa’s son, the war criminal? Because that’s your other option right now. And you, of all people, should know that past a certain point family counts for precisely _nothing_.” Kylo went ashy at that, his lips parting slightly. Hux had intended it to cut, after all.

He steeled himself and approached again, clearly signaling his intent to reach for Kylo’s wrists. The other man stood his ground, paralyzed by discomfort about their proximity but obviously unwilling to pass back over the threshold of the cell. True disbelief crept into the set of Kylo’s brows and he tensed up when Hux went for the binders, only releasing his pent-up breath when the things clicked open with an air of finality and Hux cast them aside to thunk heavily on the floor.

He snatched his hands back to himself, massaging the angry red bands of chafe and slowly shaking his head. “Hux, I don’t-”

“Shut up.” He carefully toed at the barrel of his blaster to skid it away behind himself, then took a pace back to bend and retrieve it. “Are you coming or not?”

It wasn’t really a question. Kylo’s face darkened and he glared, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. Hux turned and began walking, just daring Kylo not to follow. He should know that Hux was his only chance of getting off this ship, one not only unfamiliar to him but also soon to be swarmed with the enemy, and he’d be facing them unarmed and unarmored.

A destination crystallized in Hux’s mind: there was a small escape pod bay not far from here, outboard off the primary port companionway just past the freight turbolift. He suddenly felt vaguely sick, realizing the implications of his own plan. It had all come down to running, to abandoning all he’d built as it came crumbling down, a desperate shot to salvage _something_ in the eleventh hour even if it was only their two of some eighty thousand-odd lives.

“I don’t need you,” came Kylo’s rumble, low and defiant from behind Hux. He hadn’t moved a centimeter, still standing framed by the dark void of the cell.

Unacceptable.

Hux stopped dead in his tracks and whirled around, striding in close until he could feel Kylo’s breath hot in his face. He fisted his free hand into the man’s shirt and shoved him up hard against the edge of the doorframe, invading his personal space with flashing eyes and acid on his tongue.

Kylo hissed and grimaced and gripped at his forearms for stability, but let him do it. When Hux wanted something and wanted it _now_ , he didn’t hold back. He didn’t know how to _be_ any other way, even when he abhorred himself for it, last night’s ego-crushing realization pitifully insufficient to override the cutthroat instincts ingrained in him since childhood. He slammed the man back again, as much as he could given that they were already pressed close against the durasteel. The way Kylo was looking at him made him want to scream, his strong features bleeding out the same nihilistic intensity he’d been struck by back on Balchorra when he had dared Hux to do it, to shoot him dead there in that cell.

“Why would I do this, Kylo?” he snarled, desperation slipping in under the rage. “Why? Think about it. I’ve abandoned my kriffing post by coming here, by letting you out of that cell. Would I ever make that choice, _especially_ at a time of crisis, for someone I didn’t truly care for? You’ve known me for years, even if we weren’t _together_ for all of them.”

“I-,” Kylo stammered, the eerie resignation fracturing with hairline cracks of self-doubt. He could see the frustrated effort on his face, the kind he got when straining fruitlessly to push out with the Force.

“Look me dead in the eye and tell me I’m doing this for any other reason.”

“Preserving an asset. Leverage. You still want to _use_ me-”

“None of that would kriffing matter! We’ve already _lost!”_ Those last words were a scream and they _hurt_ coming out, right up in Kylo’s face. He knew he was flushed red, hot and dizzyingly out of control.

“ _You_ lost,” sneered Kylo. “I have nothing to do with this.”

Hux just exhaled a scornful _tch_ , releasing him with a shove and swinging away. “You know what? You said you wanted to believe that I cared, so kriffing _do_ it,” he offered, drawing his reclaimed pistol and popping the cylinder open to check the charge. “Give me the benefit of the doubt, if just for now. After we get through this you can do whatever you want. Leave, even follow through and kill me, for all that I care. But now is not the bloody time for this.”

The man just stared, brows knit and mouth parted. For once, Hux had left him speechless.

“We need to go _now_.”

He moved to stalk away, their gazes locked as he clicked the blaster back together and took the first step sideways. Kylo swore sharply and his fists twitched, clearly barely restrained from punching something, probably the wall or, more likely, Hux’s teeth.

But he did follow, his heavy steps picking up a moment after Hux’s own. Their joint, wordless rhythm clicked and shuffed beneath the incessant claxons and distant shouting and the occasional buzzing flicker of the emergency lights, and Hux found himself bound between two yawning uncertainties: the man behind him, and the imminent quantum collapse of whatever fate awaited ahead.

He hoped like hell that they had a chance.


	8. Scratch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ATTENTION: For a final (very important) chapter content warning, please see the end notes!  
> 

They’d almost made it to the port companionway when Kylo dropped.

He went down hard, crumpling against the slanted wall with a groan. The nearby lights crackled violently out, sending the corridor into semidarkness and Hux’s heart into his throat as he whirled around.

That had been the Force. They must’ve finally crossed out of the damping field, he realized: nothing between them but air, now. He swallowed.

“Kylo?”

Nothing, just a whimper.

Hux closed the several paces back to the man before he could think any better of it, dropping to kneel in front of his sagging form. His eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom, straining to pick out anything besides the white of Kylo’s clothes in the cold half-light from the T-intersection they’d nearly reached. After a few more moments he managed to make out his face, and the look of it sent cold dread trickling down his back.

Hux had no idea how any of this Force business really worked, at least not on the level required to understand whatever was happening to Kylo. He seemed caught, curled in on himself with his hands white-knuckled around his temples where sweat had broken over the skin. He breathed in hard, uneven pants, his teeth bared, his eyes screwed shut. Hux reached out, closing his palm over one of the man’s wrists and testing the give; it offered absolutely none. He could feel the forearm muscles twitching like bands of durasteel as the man tried to crush his own skull, all tension and no release.

“Snap out of it,” Hux growled, a tinge of panic threading through his tone. Again, nothing.

He slapped him, the sting sharp on his bare palm. Desperation ruled the clench of his jaw and the hardness of his hand, compelling him to strike again and again in quick succession, each one jarring Kylo’s head until finally the man gasped, his eyes snapping open to glint dully. They were blank and unseeing and terrible, and Hux recoiled. He could practically smell the stench of that fetid pool.

Shit.

He’d suspected something like this might happen once he got Kylo past the field, and even Kylo himself had alluded to the possibility, but he hadn’t thought it could possibly incapacitate him to the same degree as at Snoke’s citadel. After all, Kylo had woken up entirely on his own after all those months of vacillating between sedation, sleep, and convulsions. Hux had taken it as a sign of healing from whatever Snoke had done. Perhaps he’d been wrong.

Blaster fire suddenly chattered out over the persistent alarms, and it was _close_ , jerking Hux’s attention away to the junction with the pedestrian artery. They’d remained relatively isolated until now in the detention block, but once they turned that corner they’d be in the thick of it. A small band of Stormtroopers and enlisted crew ran past as he watched, weapons readied as they flicked in and then out of his view. Screams and more gunfire followed.

Kriff. He’d stopped checking his chrono, but he hadn’t anticipated the Republicans managing to push through to here so fast. Things must be falling apart, and quickly.

But he couldn’t move Kylo with him like this.

“Kylo, there’s no _time_ ,” he hissed, turning back to the man and shaking him again. “Kylo!”

Nothing. Kriffing- _nothing_ , not a twitch, just a small, pitiful keen. He straightened and stepped back in consternation, moving a habitual hand to adjust his hat, but- right, he’d never picked it back up before leaving Battle Command. He wanted to scream, torn between his infernal commitment to Kylo and the panicking animal in his brain that urged him to just _go_ , to run, to leave the man. He swung away and tried to smooth his unkempt hair down so he could just _think_ , damn it, come up with _something_. His heart hammered like it had never known any other pace, stuck for too long in a body trying to stop its slide towards what could well be an inevitable brink, just beyond the horizon.

Kylo’s whimpers turned into a thick groan and Hux dropped back down to peer at him, reaching out to brush his hair aside and grip his burning cheek. Kylo shuddered and tried to recoil at the touch, his eyes flicking about frantically as some degree of focus clamored back into them, but Hux urged his face up until he finally caught that disquieting gaze. Kylo’s rictus of an expression slackened ever so slightly and his fingers flexed, slipping a few centimeters down through the strands they’d tangled.

“That’s it,” Hux urged breathily. “Come on. Stay with me.”

More screams from just beyond the corner, a brief quieting, and then the growing tromp of boots. Hux didn’t even need to turn to know it wasn’t his Stormtroopers. Another short pause, this time at the junction proper, and then the too dissimilar, too disorganized steps turned to move down the detention wing. Towards him and Kylo.

Hux clenched his jaw, the muscles popping in his cheek as he exhaled through his nose, and calmly slid his pistol from its holster as he crouched. He reluctantly broke the contact with Kylo and shuffled half a meter back until his shoulders hit the low profile of the frame behind him, leaving the man alone in his agonized sag. The small outcrop offered only a narrow triangle of cover in which to squeeze himself and he hoped it would shield Kylo too, at least partially, because there was no way he could tug his bulk in closer without his cooperation. It was all they had.

The safety slid smoothly off at a slow flick of Hux’s thumb.

He couldn’t die here. He refused to.

If he angled his head to the side, he could flick his eyes up to watch the play of back-cast shadows on the opposite bulkhead. He took another deep, steadying breath, trying to estimate the number of soldiers by the sounds of their approach. A squad of seven, perhaps ten? Too many to take on alone either way, especially given his paltry combat experience. There. A shadow flickered across the wall at the edge of his vision and he tensed, body ready to fire around the frame in self-defense, but it would only amount to potshots and he couldn’t-

His comm chimed, loud and clear and piercing over the still-echoing breach alarm. _Bloody fucking-_ it was Phasma, the high priority tone. He slammed the silence button but it was already too late, the boots scuffing abruptly to a halt. He heard the telltale click of a reload.

“Show yourself!” came a woman’s shout.

Hux just hissed and let his head knock back against the durasteel, his canines gnawing a worry spot into his cheek. The shadows remained unmoving. A quick glance back to Kylo found him still hunched up in the darkness, albeit a hair more relaxed than before. At this point, though, the difference was hardly worth noting.

“If you surrender willingly, we won’t hurt you,” the woman called again over the noise. A shadow shifted, moving slowly closer. If Hux were a religious man, this would be the point at which he’d pray; instead, he floundered. Both of his options, capture or death, were unacceptable. Maybe if he could stall? Just long enough for Kylo to get his wits back? Then maybe, just maybe…

It was a hell of a stretch.

“Final warning,” came the woman, probably their squad leader. “If you don’t cooperate, we are authorized to use lethal force.”

“Wait!” he called, tucking the barrel of his blaster between his knees and slowly putting his hands up, out from the cover of the frame. He didn’t immediately lose one to the scouring burn of plasma, so that was a start.

“If you’re armed, slide your weapon to the other side of the hall,” came a gruff order, from a man this time.

“What guarantee do I have that you won’t fire on us if I do?”

“You’re not in a position to negotiate.”

Kriff. Time for a different tactic. “I’m with an injured man,” he called back. “I won’t do anything until I know he’ll be safe.”

A muffled exchange of words occurred, and then the woman spoke again. “Comply, or it won’t matter whether he’s injured or not. Again, final warning.”

“I don’t have a weapon.”

“Banthashit.”

He was fucking dead.

The boots started closing again, quickly now, and he whipped his sidearm out from between his legs. The first shot elicited a scream and a thud, even fired blindly across his shoulder. A brittle sliver of hysteria snapped inside of him and he snarled, ready to turn and level his aim in earnest for whatever time he had left in this universe, to take down as many of the Republican scum as he could before going out with a crater in his chest like the military man he was, tactician or no.

A hail of blaster fire erupted and the animal part of his brain ruthlessly vetoed _that_ self-destructive impulse, adrenaline slamming into him like a freighter at hyperspeed. He flinched back behind the frame, momentum aborted. The stench of burning hair hit his nostrils and Hux realized that it was his own, some lock singed off bare millimeters from his skull. The next thing he realized was that whoever was firing wasn’t shooting at him, but rather _past_ him, most of the shots going wide and several more Republicans crying out. He ground his teeth and waited, pinned down behind the frame and unable to observe as stray shots sizzled out on the walls leading deeper into the detention block. He couldn’t dare to hope.

“Hux?” came a small voice, and he turned to see Kylo half inclined towards him, one palm on the floor, present and speaking again amidst the chaos regardless of his faraway tone.

“Stay down!” he hissed, lunging to grab him by the collar and drag him closer in behind the cover. Kylo scrambled up against the bulkhead without protest, close enough for the heat of his arm to seep through Hux’s now-scuffed dress jodhpurs as they both pressed into the corner. He still looked utterly disoriented, the lightning-flash glow of the shots reflecting in his hazy eyes.

Suddenly, silence. Relatively, at least. Hux breathed once, twice, deep ins and outs, and swallowed before slowly peering around into the hall while retaining one hand in Kylo’s shirt to keep him near the bulkhead. Bodies littered the floor, smoking and filling the space with the acrid scent of charred wounds. A small group of people moved over them, silhouetted in the light from the intersection.

Stormtroopers.

Hux could’ve laughed. Their outlines were unmistakable, as were the uniforms of the dead Republicans under their feet. One man groaned and rolled only to jerk at the sharp impact of a bolt in his chest, fired by the ‘Trooper above him as they swept the scene. Hux stood slowly, arms up to signal nonaggression.

“Identify yourself,” The ‘Trooper on point started, leveling their rifle, but they stumbled over the rest as reaction changed to recognition in the gloom. “Sir? What-”

“At ease,” he managed, and all three of the ‘Troopers snapped off crisp salutes. Two enlisted crew accompanied them, both women, one armed with a standard pistol and the other with a salvaged Republican rifle.

“Your grace?” asked the shorter one hesitantly, her voice both startled and concerned. She looked shaken as she approached to within a couple meters, and he didn’t blame her. Something about her seemed familiar, and in more than the passing way one got from working around thousands of rotating personnel each day. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” he responded, re-holstering his sidearm with a shaky breath and falling into parade rest. “Name and rank.”

“Paramita Yama, sir. Chief petty officer, First Medical Corps.” Her gaze flicked sideways and her eyes widened, fear suddenly washing her round, tawny face. Hux turned to see Kylo dragging himself up by the wall, swaying slightly and staring off into the distance, sweat rolling down his neck and drenching his shirtfront. Yama retreated a step and Hux caught a limp in her movements, and recognition suddenly clicked.

The meditech.

“It’s fine,” he assured, perhaps too firmly, one hand half-up mostly to placate her. The other crewwoman looked merely confused and the ‘Troopers remained carefully unfazed, awaiting orders. Only Yama’s hands trembled around the grip of her firearm.

“Kylo,” he called, low and forcibly calm. The man turned, fingers flexing on the hand he wasn’t using to brace himself.

“It’s back,” he panted, his face splitting in a bright-eyed baring of teeth that some might call a smile. But then he winced and the grin shattered, what must have been sharp-edged pain making him press at his temple again. “I have it _back,”_ he repeated, barely audible through the hiss of air past his teeth.

Kylo didn’t _seem_ like a danger to anyone right now, but one never knew. Still, it was enough for Hux. He turned back to Yama, trying to keep his unsettlement off his face, but he knew she saw it anyway. Everything was too bare and too honest right now for all of them.

“Is this as far as they’ve pushed?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she responded, then hastily tacked on the forgotten “sir.” She kept one nervous eye on Kylo, but managed to keep her trepidation in check. “We were at the primary port hangar when they broke through. It was-” She just went gray and shook her head. “We couldn’t stay to help. We fell back before circling to try to regroup, and ran into _them_.”

Yama gestured to the corpses, still smoking faintly, and Hux grimaced. He’d hoped they would’ve been able to hold the hangars for longer. He reached to his hip, activating his comm to see what Phasma had sent. It displayed one rejected audio call, and then an unopened text transmission. He tapped it.

 _Hope to see you on the other side,_ it read. Nothing else. Nothing tactical. Just… that.

She was probably dead by now.

Another pang of loss clenched in his chest, more broken glass in the pile, though this point it was honestly all starting to blend together. When Hux looked back up, Yama seemed to be looking _through_ him, processing something about him. He didn’t like it. “We need to move,” he ordered. “Take a right out here, head for the freight turbolift. Stay together and cover each other.”

“Yes, your grace,” the second officer replied, and the Stormtroopers took point again back towards the thoroughfare. Yama hesitated for a moment and then followed, leaving Hux to gather Kylo.

“Come on,” he said, gripping the man’s upper arm.

“No,” Kylo gasped, shaking him off when he tried to pull. “I can walk.” He still had a vague air of shellshock about him, his eyes too bright and the sweat continuing to pour, gathering along his hairline and making the unruly strands stick in waves around his face. The companionway was chilly, enough to make the hairs on the back of Hux’s hands prickle up, a stark contrast to the heat he’d felt in Kylo’s skin.

Hux didn’t respond to the protest for independence, just relieved to have him functional and cooperating. It was slow going at first but eventually the unsteadiness vanished from Kylo’s legs, and they caught easily back up with the rest of the group. Hux trailed half a pace behind him, one hand hovering in case he decided to collapse again.

They rounded the corner and began down the artery without incident, moving away under fully functional emergency lights from where he’d overheard the first firefight occur. It was eerily empty. They were so close, now, entering the final intersection before the corridor to their destination. So close.

Hux heard it over the alarms before he saw it and reacted in kind, diving headlong into the right branch of the junction and hitting the floor with Kylo pulled down next to him. The blaster bolt struck home right in the neck of the Stormtrooper who’d been immediately ahead of Kylo, dropping them like a stone. He scrambled back up and drew, leaving Kylo to grunt and roll to his chest where he’d landed. How had the man not noticed enemies behind them?

More shots erupted, the two remaining ‘Troopers laying down suppressive fire from the opposite side of the junction in response. The side, Hux realized, that _they_ needed to be on. The outboard side, the one that led towards the escape pod bay.

Of course.

Yama skidded into view a moment later, breathing in huffs and clutching her weapon as she slammed back against the wall of the side passage. The way she handled the thing spoke of fear and inexperience, but then again, Hux could hardly say he was much better. The number of times he’d had to actually use his pistol outside of the range had been small. Meanwhile Kylo was dragging himself up yet again on Hux’s right, framed by the curve of the hall as it stretched away back towards the heart of the _Adjudicator_ , more little winces of pain overshadowing whatever emotion he’d be wearing on his face otherwise.

“We need to get to the other side,” Hux said, addressing Yama.

“There’s too many of them, sir,” she panted, flinching back from the corner as another dense volley of shots sizzled past. “They shot Brahx, too. She’s gone. There’s at least- kriff, two squad’s worth?” A dash of absurd horror crept into her expression at having just let a curse slip in the Emperor’s presence, her face open and waiting for orders, looking at him like one would a beacon. It was a gaze he’d gotten far, far too many times today.

Take control of the situation. Always take control.

“Kylo,” Hux started, helping him up the rest of the way only to fix him with a look he couldn’t skitter away from. He gave a weak flinch back, but Hux held his damp shoulders. “Can you stop the bolts long enough for us to get past?”

“I don’t- I don’t know,” the man breathed, slack jawed, turning his palms over and still flexing as though they’d just been installed. “It’s still _shaky_. This isn’t… how it should feel.”

Hux could pick up on some sort of unsettling energy from Kylo now that he was this close, like nothing he’d ever felt before. It hadn’t been there when the lights had blown, or when he’d tugged him out of the line of fire. It seemed to shiver brokenly in the air between them, like Kylo was a poorly shielded heat sink.

He gripped him harder, trying to get his attention back from his hands. “If we don’t cross, we’re _stuck here_ , you understand? We- Kylo?”

His head had suddenly snapped up, but not to look at Hux. Instead his eyes fixed solidly on something far beyond the bulkhead over Hux’s shoulder, something definitely not _here_. The tension came roiling back, the sinews of Kylo’s shoulders and arms straining themselves into steely immobility under his touch.

“She’s here,” Kylo breathed, half realization, half warning. “I can feel her.”

“Who? Your-“

“No,” he growled, as though Hux were an idiot for asking. “The _scavenger_.”

Before he knew it, Kylo had broken out from his hold and staggered back. One flick of his gaze to the choked junction, another down the arcing hall, and then a hard, steady look at Hux.

“Kylo- _shit!_ ”

The man was gone, vanishing off around the curve at a shaky jog.

Hux was left with his mouth hanging open, one abortive step after him, a scream lodged at the back of his throat. They’d been so fucking close, and Kylo pulls _this?_ He wanted nothing more in that moment than to chase the man down and maybe rip his throat out, not that he’d actually be able to, what with Kylo freshly unfettered. But at the same time he couldn’t leave this little squad, not now, not with his escape plan so infuriatingly close. He turned back towards Yama and to the ‘Troopers across the way, obscured by a staccato screen of plasma bolts, and the dark companionway extending behind them. Those muzzle discharges were growing louder.

“You should go, sir,” Yama said softly, catching his attention and nodding grimly. “We’ve got this.”

Not with only her and two Stormtroopers, they didn’t. Hux saw in her eyes that she knew it, and knew that he did as well.

She’d seen it all, in that medical suite. Kylo nearly killing him, and him returning the favor. She’d _heard_ it all, too. Everything. The verbal sparring, the rage, his choked confessions. It had been the revelation of a self-destructing covert relationship, the knowledge of which had previously been restricted to their triumvirate-to-be for fear of Snoke’s discovery. This one enlisted meditech, by bad luck and unlikely timing, knew more about him than perhaps any other person still alive in the galaxy, save for Kylo. She’d seen him as a mere man, gotten a bloody glance under the tailored image of the Emperor he wore like a second skin.

And still, even after all she’d seen of him, she’d made that offer.

Her face was drawn tight above the collar of her dark duty uniform, her pin-straight black hair just brushing the bottom of it where it had been jerked from her bun. She was young, he realized, no more than twenty-five, but with bedrock-solid conviction hidden beneath the fear in her brown eyes. She was, suddenly, more than just a name and rank.

“Go, sir. Please. This isn’t where the Emperor dies.”

He’d owe her a life debt he couldn’t repay.

“I-“

“ _Please,_ sir.”

_Fuck._

“Thank you,” he managed, and took off at a dead sprint.

 

 

It didn’t take him long to catch sight of Kylo again, but running him down was a separate matter entirely. The bastard always managed to stay just shy of a corner ahead of him, enough for Hux to catch a moment’s glimpse of a leg or his back before he slipped away again. The man could move.

After a while, Hux realized that he wasn’t just chasing. He was being _led._

The twists and turns Kylo took seemed to make little sense, confusing enough that even Hux had trouble pinpointing where they were after a while, at least beyond the general directions of _inboard_ and _up._ They drew close to the sounds of combat several times but never actually encountered it, much to Hux’s relief. Whenever he faltered and slowed, out of breath from running farther than he had in years, Kylo lingered that much longer before forging on.

Eventually he began to recognize their surroundings once more, piecing together the fragments of a path. They were beyond the areas of conflict now, nothing but claxons and his own bootfalls and breath echoing through the ship. He’d traveled this particular set of corridors frequently. They led to the flight bridge.

Why in all hells was Kylo going to the _flight bridge?_ It should still be in combat lockdown-

He skidded around the final corner and suddenly found himself within ten meters of the man, the muscles of his arm and back straining with the Force as the blast shutter in front of them ground the last few centimeters open against its will. Beyond lay the dark, starry hint of panoramic windows.

“Kylo!” Hux snarled, fresh anger gracing him with a second wind. Kylo had already gotten two paces inside when he turned in answer, flushed from the chase and his shirt drenched beyond what the strange fever running through him could possibly do on its own.

Hux surged in and clocked him before he could even think about it, right in the jaw. Kylo stumbled, caught the next blow, and sent Hux sprawling. He slid several meters along the hard-polished floor between the crew pits before coming to a halt, and rolled up on one elbow just in time to see the shutter slam closed. The smooth hiss of the standard pneumatic doors closing over it followed, double-sealing them inside. Kylo clenched his fist with a pained grimace and the control panel imploded in a waterfall of sparks.

“We were so close!” Hux shouted, drawing himself to his feet. “We could’ve been _gone_ by now, and instead you’ve trapped us in here!”

“You were the one who came after me,” he panted.

“I’m not- I wasn’t going to leave without you. Have you even listened to a damn thing I’ve said?”

One look at the serious expression on his face told him that yes, he had, and he’d exploited that commitment to get them both here. Hux twitched.

“Kylo, I swear to-“

“The scavenger will have felt me like I can feel her,” Kylo interrupted, pushing his sweaty hair back over his head with a jitter. “She would’ve followed us. Told their fleet which pod was ours.”

“And what’s going to stop her from following you here, too?”

“Nothing.”

“Then it makes no bloody _difference!_ ” Hux screamed, his chest heaving, his fists trembling at his sides as he stared death at Kylo. This was it. There was nowhere left to go, no grand plan that could save _any_ of this. Not a single damned scrap. Numbness bloomed abruptly in his chest like a peculiar punch to the sternum, trembling out to the rest of him in a deadening wash. The rage faltered from his face accordingly, leaving what had been beneath it scoured.

This was what powerlessness felt like.

He shut his eyes and sucked a trembling breath in through barely parted lips, listened to it shake softly as it hissed back out past his teeth. He let his fists unclench, the sting of air on nerves making him glance down to see that this time he’d actually broken skin, four small crescents cut into each palm. They welled up red in the pale, sideways light from the viewport as he watched with strange detachment.

He’d held whole systems in his hands, arbitrated trillions of lives and taken their leaders’ fealty, if they’d pleased him. And now all he had left were these, a final octet of perfect, bloody moons for his Empire before it all went to dust.

How fitting.

Leaving Kylo to fall back heavily against the doors, Hux turned to face the long, gentle curve of windows. His feet walked him where he wanted to go, not out of necessity or protocol anymore, but because it simply didn’t matter what he did. There was no hurry. He drew close, the panorama overtaking his vision, nothing but a few handbreadths and a triple-layered pane of transparisteel separating him from the black.

He lifted a shaky palm and pressed against it. It was cold.

Out there, in the vacuum, half the hull of a ravaged star destroyer loomed slantwise against a blanket of stars, sidelit by the thin bluish shine of Balchorra’s single sun. X-wing thrusters flared far away, a small formation arcing out from behind the hulking carcass and burning hot until they flickered past bits of a Republican frigate, and then disappeared for good from Hux’s vantage. It all seemed nearly frozen, evidence of the chaotic tableau's movement only clear after watching for several long moments. Some of the abundant wreckage would eventually escape into deep space or be picked for salvage, but most would spiral down to impact Balchorra’s surface over the next decades and scour the landscape forever.

He’d dreamed of a version of this view, despite all his precautions and rules. To be on the flight bridge during active combat tempted catastrophe, but he’d _craved_ the chance to gaze out in person upon the raw evidence of his power, to _rule_ over it. He’d wanted to reclaim the rush he’d sunk into when Starkiller first fired, his first ground-shaking taste of realized possibility. Except that here he’d actually be able to see his targets, his weapons different and his body as close to touching the unforgiving void as it would ever get. The thrill was in walking the line.

Another shuddered breath, a deep in and out.

This was all wrong, now. No harmonic hum of systems, no officers buzzing about the pits, not even internal lights or the sound of a claxon: when he’d ordered power redirection to life support, locked-down areas lost their other services first. All that the panoramic view evoked in him now was a dead, icy chill.

His jaw twitched.

“I bought us time,” Kylo rumbled from across the chamber, cutting the ringing silence.

“Time for _what,_ Kylo?” Hux snarled halfheartedly, and turned to look over his shoulder. His hand slipped from the transparisteel, leaving a wet smear behind.

“I’m giving you a chance.” The man pushed from the door and started towards him, his broken paces nearly enough to recall another time, another bridge. Hux almost laughed at the absurdity of what he’d heard, and gave his attention back to the void. A chance? What the hell for? There was nothing else to do _,_ and Kylo knew it damn well.

A closeness, a heat near his back, labored breaths over his shoulder. He squeezed his eyes shut, not wanting to acknowledge his perhaps most damning mistake, this man he’d used and fell for and fucked it all up with. A small voice, the other-Hux, whispered that had he simply kept his composure in that bloody room all of this could’ve been prevented, that he wouldn’t be trapped on a ship that might well become both their graves, that they’d be _happy_ together.

But no, he realized, a wash of cold certainty sluicing away that fantasy self, the one with kisses on his neck and the Force clearing his way to victory. It was a delusion.

Kylo would have found out eventually, and despite the tenderness in those last days, he was certainly not a kind man. Neither of them were. It would’ve been a difficult task, to keep something so foundational hidden from a lover for years, maybe even decades. The only true solution would’ve been never to play their little game in the first place, to disengage from the snipes and jabs that had slipped into cornerings and rutting and snarls, something mixed with _opportunity_ , and then something more. And yet Hux knew that if given a second chance, he’d be incapable of changing his decisions. The path he’d chosen had meant order, control, and Imperial reign.

Maybe this dark, silent bridge had been his fate all along.

Kylo shifted closer still and then, after a hesitant moment, he felt hot fingertips settle lightly between his shoulder blades. His body didn’t know what it wanted, to flinch away or to revel in the fact that Kylo had touched him of his own volition.

“Let me in again,” came the rumble.

“I didn’t _let_ you _anywhere,_ ” he choked out, his head bent low.

“Armitage.”

And- fuck. No one called him that, not even Kylo, not even when he was… _compromised_. Hux opened his eyes and turned, the hand trailing to his shoulder as he did so. Kylo’s eyes glinted too-bright in the reflected wash of light from the ravaged destroyer’s hull, a weak moon-glow.  He could still see the crippling pain there, the surging, convulsive blankness shoved back and held tremblingly at bay by sheer force of will. He wore a drawn and serious expression.

“Let me _look._ I need to know if you- if you were telling the truth. If I was… wrong.”

A dead man’s wish. What reason was there to deny him?

The floor slammed hard into his knees. He watched as Kylo sank down wordlessly after him, and nearly reached to brace himself on the other man’s thigh but thought better of it at the last moment. He sagged to the side instead, supporting himself with one hand. A foreign prickle started behind his eyes, but he tried his hardest to ignore it. Kylo brought his hands up, pushing those long fingers firmly through the hair at Hux’s temples. He bit his lip.

“Kylo, I-“

“Shh.”

It wasn’t comforting.

His thoughts slogged under Kylo’s influence, then flickered disorientingly. It wasn’t like… the other time. No pain, but rather a wrong, _fractured_ feeling. Hux hissed and suddenly he was looking at himself, transposed for a split second into Kylo’s perspective. The sight arrested his breath and he saw his own eyes widen, ringed beneath with purple. Dried blood smeared across his cheek and into one sideburn, the rest of his hair sweaty and mussed and half blackened by soot above his ruined uniform. He looked positively haunted, framed by a corona of dead light, and he suddenly buckled under the weight of a terrified, dangerous need that wasn’t his own.

Everything snapped back around into place just as quickly as it had dislodged, Kylo gasping and gripping harder before they lurched back under.

This time it worked. Kylo plunged in, rifling through his memories as though flipping the pages of a ream of flimsi. Many already had his fingerprints on them. Those Hux let him have, trying to push the truth, the _whole_ truth, along with them as he snatched them up again. Others were new, transferred in impressions and bright flashes: the rollercoaster of emotions he’d ridden immediately after stabbing him, the crippling need for Kylo to understand that what he’d ripped from his head the first time had been _wrong_. The confusing mess of compulsions and twists in the gut from their conversations afterwards, with Kylo shuttered away behind transparisteel. Everything going to hell and their flight here to the bridge. And then, tacked on to the end, was the drinking, the dissociation, and the moment he’d smashed his glass on the mirror in a horrible admission of fallibility.

That one hurt to let him pry out.

Hux heaved in a stuttering breath, released back into the cold present. He’d lost all track of time. His muscles trembled and he sagged to lean just below where the panes began, Kylo’s hands slipping free and back to his sides.

“I wasn’t wrong.”

Hux flinched. Those eyes bore into him like hot pokers and Kylo spoke with a pained hiss, shaking where he knelt. He seemed drained by what he’d just done.

“But you also do mean it,” the man continued, volume growing. “Kriff, you really do. When you say you care. But you still- _Fuck!”_

Hux stayed silent, glancing away down the arc of the viewport as Kylo worked himself up. He didn’t have anything to say. He’d known that letting the man scrape out his mental insides wouldn’t fix things between them, not after he himself had realized that how he’d cultivated their relationship couldn’t be glossed over by genuine feelings, not given Kylo’s history. But _fuck_ did he still want it to mend the wounds anyway, because Hux _cared_ about him, damn it, even after everything Kylo had done, so why couldn’t that just be enough?

He wanted the infernal man back, if it was the last thing he got in this life.

“Kylo-,” he started, only to be cut off.

“Don’t, Hux.”

“Kylo, _please._ I- _”_ The word felt like broken glass over his tongue. He couldn’t believe he was _begging_.

“No,” he refused, shaking his head and stumbling back to his feet. “Just stop.” The anguish on his face coalesced into something hard and dangerous. Hux reached abortively out, trying to snag the thin, standard issue fabric of his pant leg, a desperate, meaningless plea.

Kylo jerked back. “Don’t _touch_ me-“

Something slammed into the doors. The sound rolled through the bridge, like a drumbeat. Kylo’s head whipped around, and they both went dead silent.

Another impact, another pause.

Shit.

Palm to grip, draw, safety off. Hux stood up, back to the pane, eyes trained on the entrance, anguish shoved aside and just barely drowned by momentarily greater concerns. Kylo’s hand twitched to a lightsaber long gone, then into a fist. After a moment sparks burst from the steel, trailing a hot line as they moved sideways and scattering to illuminate the far dark edge of the chamber, just past where the light reflecting in from space cut off in the tops of trapezoids. A plasma cutter. A fast one.

“Is she here?”

Kylo nodded and swung around, taking a wide stance perhaps a meter ahead of Hux and slightly to his left. They both watched, wordless, as the plasma hissed and the stench of burning oxides permeated the air.

Hux swallowed, dry mouthed. He had no illusions about Kylo’s ability to beat the scavenger, not unarmed and in his current state. Just keeping himself together and coherent were clearly hefty tasks on their own, not to even mention harnessing the Force. And what could he himself do, one man with a pistol and no cover?

The sparks had come nearly full circle.

“I won’t let them have me,” Hux murmured with sudden calm conviction. “They’ll try to take us alive if they can.”

Kylo turned to look at him, ever so slightly, his brows furrowed. He knew what Hux meant, the unspoken commitment there.

“I just… I thought you should know.”

He’d made his peace when he’d first taken in the sweeping panorama from the viewport, pressed his bloody hand against it and left one last mark across the stars. He thought of Organa’s face, distorted through the lens of the guttering holoprojector, and of how he’d seen nothing but corruption and scorn there. He would not let her have this one last thing from him, because his autonomy was his own. In a choice between death or becoming the Republic’s spectacle, the decision was easy.

But he would not take his own life.

“Hux-“

“You should consider what you want for yourself, Kylo,” he warned, and then the door burst down.

It landed concussively, flat metal on metal, thin smoke boiling up and out from the broad hole towards the overhead. The edges still glowed red when the first soldiers poured through, around ten of them taking up position on either side and leveling their sights before the scavenger emerged. She wore swirling grey and green and had a cutting, determined look about her. This was no longer the girl Kylo had snatched from Takodana, no: the woman Hux saw was one possessed of dangerous convictions, and the grit to see them through.

Hux didn’t hesitate. He fired twice in rapid succession, only to have both bolts batted away by the flash-quick ignition and twirl of her lightsaber. The green blades hummed ominously as she stilled in a battle stance, her feet angled wide front and back, and her ‘saber hand tilted down behind her. The other provided ready counterbalance and a signal to the Republican soldiers to hold steady.

She glared at Hux, but then her gaze slipped sideways to Kylo and surprise momentarily faltered in her expression. Whatever she’d expected to encounter here, it probably hadn’t been this pale, wrong-feeling version of him.

“Give yourselves up,” she demanded, recovering quickly. “You lost. There’s nowhere else to run.”

“You,” Kylo growled, before Hux could say anything. He took several tense steps forward and Hux could _see_ the beast under his skin, practically clawing to get out. The air pressure on the bridge seemed to flicker and flare brokenly, the man’s fingers twitching at his sides.

“I have a _name_ , you know,” the scavenger spat, anger plain on her face. “It’s Rey.”

“You’re not taking me anywhere, girl-with-a-name.” He shot out his arm and did _something_ , the woman trembling violently for a moment before she shouted and pushed back with her whole body. Kylo went flying, slammed off his feet by the Force and tossed high against the viewport pane. He hit with a meaty crack and cried out, bouncing off to crumple at the edge of the starboard crew pit. Hux thought he heard something snap.

“What _happened_ to you?” she asked, disgust and confusion warring for dominance over her expression, combining into something akin to horror. Kylo shuddered and pushed himself up, first to his knees and then, staggering, to his feet. What Hux could see of the side of his face looked deathly pale, and he clutched one arm to his soaked chest.

Kylo just laughed.

Hux raised his pistol again and leveled it not at the scavenger, but past her to the soldiers. He wouldn’t be able to hit her, and she and Kylo seemed… occupied, anyhow, gazes locked on one another. He wasn’t privy to whatever jagged, trembling energies surged in the fifteen meters between them.

“Drop your weapon,” ordered the man who must have been the squad leader. He twitched his muzzle down to emphasize. “We don’t want to kill you. You can still cooperate.”

“I don’t _cooperate_. I’m the bloody _Emperor_.”

 _“Drop it_.”

“I will not,” Hux spat, and pulled the trigger.

Several things happened nearly at once, like the inexorable collision of two planets: with astonishing speed up close, but agonizingly slowly if one took a step back to appreciate the scale.

The squad leader dropped with a cry, spinning as Hux’s bolt clipped him in the arm. Kylo staggered back and collapsed to his knees again like he’d been punched in the gut, just a pace away from Hux, and the scavenger advanced in turn. Her eyes blazed with reflected green, her lightsaber the brightest thing in the bridge’s semi-darkness as she stepped onto the central walkway and into a trapezoid of light. Hux fired again, the first shot going high but the next hitting another soldier square in the chest, and that was enough for the squadron.

They fired.

 _“Hux!_ ” Kylo shouted, wrenching himself away from the scavenger’s approach and throwing out his left arm, the unbroken one. He looked wild, barely there, the sweat-soaked strands of his hair in utter disarray as he trembled and twitched with exertion, his face contorted desperately. Half the bolts crashed wide against the cold transparisteel behind Hux’s back but the rest of them stuttered and hung, crackling blue in the middle of the walkway for a long, crushing moment.

And then the first one slipped. Kylo cried out in agony as it shot from his control. Hux flinched, the crackle of plasma overtaking his vision until suddenly it didn’t anymore, impacting just shy of his ear and leaving his heart in his throat. A final scream, and then Kylo lost his hold entirely. The barrage slammed around them, a bolt grazing Kylo’s shoulder, others singing around Hux’s hair and clothes.

But they hadn’t- they hadn’t actually hit him. Why the _fuck_ hadn’t they-

And then he caught sight of Kylo’s face, slack with horror where he’d crumpled.

Hux looked down. His eyes widened when he saw the pit where his stomach had once been, when he felt the charred concave shell of melted fabric and skin under his fingers, numb until it suddenly _wasn’t_ anymore.

He hit the floor hard, his legs abruptly not his own. He didn’t even scream, a broken choking noise all that managed to escape from his throat. The pain was just _too much_. He came to rest half on his side, his head lolling back on the cold surface and the overhead dominating his vision.

Someone was slapping his cheek, he realized after a whited-out moment, dragging frantic, unsteady fingers over his lips and down his chest. Everything seemed… fuzzy. He suddenly had the very strong impression that he was halfway to the left of himself and a bit up, the agony dimming to a distant throb.

“Hux,” the person choked out, and he realized it was Kylo. The man was hunched over him, touching him, shielding him from- from whom? From everything, he realized. But there was nothing he could do, now.

 _Kylo_ , he thought, urging it at him, raising an arm when Kylo just continued to shudder and touch and hover his hands uselessly over the pungent, burned scoop of a hole. The limb didn’t respond like Hux wanted it to so he tried again, pushing everything he had into it. He managed to get his hand just above his waist and Kylo grabbed it, his palms burning and salty, holding it there like a lifeline. For whom, though, was unclear. Weak light from the viewport flooded he upper half of the man’s desperate face, the rest of him cloaked deep by the shadow beneath where the pane ended.

He’d seen him like this before, Hux realized, lit like a barren moon in the slant-light. It had always been from the night side: his hair lined with silver, the touch of the stars’ cold shine washing a thin border over the swell of his shoulder or cheek or thigh and picking out each crater there as they lay together in the dark. But now either he’d moved, or Kylo had. The man was was half-lit, the sharp relief of the scar slicing his face constituting the only valley that hadn’t been a product of his own plate tectonics. He would like to think it was a waxing light, but he knew it wouldn't be true. Kylo was waning, as was he. They’d both been, for a while now.

“Ky-“ he croaked, barely audible, cut off by a cough that had him convulsing in pain after a moment. He watched from outside himself, suddenly glad not to have to feel his insides failing. What was left of them, at least.

“Kylo, I don’t-“ he managed when the fit passed, the man’s hand gently in his body’s hair now. _I don’t want to die_ , he thought. _Not like this, not forced into this choice. But maybe it was always meant to be this way._

“Shh,” Kylo whispered. “Shh. It’s okay, Hux.”

_I wanted the galaxy. I wanted everything there ever was. I wanted you back._

A gloved hand fell hard on Kylo’s shoulder, wrenching him away. He twisted and fought and screamed, raw-voiced. Hux _felt_ the moment their hands parted and the monster in Kylo returned, nothing but ugly violence and chaos remaining in his veins, his struggling body and mind throwing everything he had left back at his attackers.

Hux couldn’t watch, but not because he didn’t want to, or couldn’t bear it. He simply… had nothing left, his neck refusing to turn to follow the struggle. So instead he drifted up to the strip of deep space above his head, a mere hand’s width across, gifted to him by the slant of the viewport. Someone screamed and something flashed beyond his vision, but none of it mattered.

Feeling slipped from his arms and legs, and soon darkness encroached at the edges of his displaced consciousness, too. No unforgiving floor pressed against his body’s back anymore, no sound found its way to him, not even the stench of his own cratered flesh registered. There was nothing but calm and a suffusive, all-encompassing warmth he’d never, ever felt aboard a starship before.

But he supposed this wasn’t… typical.

He was dying.

Had Phasma felt this? Had Yama? Had they had the time? What about Mitaka, lost with the _Finalizer_? Lost with the rest of them? With _all_ of them? So _many-_

Stop.

Breathe-

No, not like that, _breathe-_

A star. Bright. Throbbing, almost, in that narrow strip of void. Of nothing. Of everything, if you looked close enough. And in the right way.

His awareness tunneled even further.

A star. A _light._

Because that was what you were supposed to see, wasn’t it?

He teetered.

Breathe.

_Breathe-_

Let the brink take. Let the dice, at last, settle.

Let yourself-

Let-

Go.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: major character death.
> 
> Immediate post-fic listening suggestion: [A Knife in the Ocean](https://youtu.be/uLEsjgKkSAs) by Foals. Turn it up.  
>  
> 
> \---
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and for your support along the way on this frankly quite dark fic. It's the longest work I've written and I began it mostly for myself, so I'm so grateful to everyone who clicked, gave kudos, commented, and otherwise pushed me to keep going.
> 
> A few final notes: 
> 
> The title, _The Die is Cast_ , is a translation of the Latin _alea iacta est_ , attributed to Julius Caesar when he decided to cross the Rubicon in 48 BCE and attack Rome with a dwindling army, igniting civil war. He knew, once he crossed, that he would either win the campaign or die. He would not be able to un-roll his dice, no matter how they fell. Caesar triumphed decisively in the following Battle of Pharsalus, ultimately ensuring his rise to Emperor; Hux, clearly, does not win.
> 
> Chapter titles are from or related to the game Hot Dice, commonly known also as Farkle. I play a ruleset in which players may "piggyback" and steal points from others by rolling any leftover dice from the prior turn, provided they land in a scoring configuration. If they do, the roller takes all; if not, they're left with nothing and their turn ends.

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up on tumblr (@[sundogsailor](http://www.sundogsailor.tumblr.com)) my dawgs


End file.
